About

My name is Yiannis Michalopoulos. I live and work in Chalandri, Athens.

By profession I work in banking. By inclination I make art objects by hand, drawing on antiquity and on nature — things to be looked at for a long time, until the mind starts moving on its own.

Why ancient faces

There is something that happens when a person stands in front of a very old face. The mind fills in what is missing. It starts asking questions that have no easy answers — about who this person was, what they believed, what the world felt like when they were in it. That quiet, unhurried thinking is what I am trying to make room for.

The figures I work with — Homer, Ammon Zeus, Socrates — were chosen because their faces have survived long enough to become almost mythical. They are over-reproduced and under-seen. My interest is in returning them to something you can hold, something that sits on a shelf and catches light differently in the morning than it does at night.

The process

The molds start from 3D models — some freely available through Scan The World, some scans of my own — adapted through 3D printing and traditional mold-making. Each cast is then finished by hand using techniques I have developed through trial and error — processes that treat the surface as something to be worn away in one piece and refined to a diamond finish in the next.

The materials and methods change as the work develops. Every piece passes through a number of different techniques — some of them current, some as old as the faces themselves. Millennia separate them, and they meet in the same object. I am drawn to anything that takes form, material or not. Even the volumes of data I work with at the bank have a shape and a behaviour. What stays constant is the question: what does this face look like when it has been through something?

The deeper reason

I sell these pieces partly to fund the next experiment, and partly because I want more people to live with ancient beauty — not behind glass in a museum, but on a desk, in a hand, in a room where ordinary life happens. If someone looks at one of these objects for ten minutes and their thoughts go somewhere unexpected, that is enough.

Soap

The same molds have been filled with soap. The same faces, cast in something meant to be used up — a head that wears away in the hand a little more each morning.

A good part of the technique came from there. Soap is where the molds were corrected and the methods worked out, and the casts that came after were better for it. The raw materials are chosen on the same terms: good ones only, and only ones I have tested myself.

Contact

If you are interested in a piece, use the reserve form or write directly. I read every message myself and reply within a few days.