Grey, grey, grey is the colour of the day, 2009 – 2011

Exhibition 'Body Memory', 29.3.-3.5.2014
Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Centre
Photo by Eleni Stergiou
Text by Syrago Tsiara
www.cact.gr

Is trauma colourful?
Panos Balomenos proposes grey as the appropriate colour for revisiting the traumatic memory, difficult to grasp and represent: the trauma caused by any form of violence and power exercised upon working people, whether it is a sexual, mental or psychological one. The artist deploys a realistic language in order to narrate extreme and shocking scenes. Both men and women, dressed in grey elegant office suits, collapse due to the pressure they experience, are lead to prostitution so that they satisfy their superiors’ desires, or even display triumphantly their ‘hole cards’, in a sarcastic allegory of everyday violence that is not so often denounced.