
JEFFREY STURGES, NEW YORK/COURTESY THE ESTATE OF THE ARTIST AND LORI BOOKSTEIN FINE ART, NEW YORK
JEFFREY STURGES, NEW YORK/COURTESY THE ESTATE OF THE ARTIST AND LORI BOOKSTEIN FINE ART, NEW YORK
This body of work, rediscovered last summer, fleshed out a project that intrigued Antonakos until 2012. It represents a less familiar aspect of his multifaceted production, consisting of pieces flaunting China marker–ed and penciled grounds that are mostly monochrome with some surfaces cut to create spare and intricate geometric patterns. Best, however, were the works in black and white, white over color, and pure white on white, making their taut structure even more apparent.
Recalling Lucio Fontana’s slashes, Antonakos’s pieces made drawing concrete, the whip-thin cuts the equivalent of line, of channels for light and color, the incompletely outlined forms dynamic in mode. He was always redefining conventional concepts of space, merging painting, sculpture, and architecture in a synthesizing, contemporary interpretation, balancing the phenomenological and the metaphoric, the sensuous and the ascetic, the theatrical and the ritualistic.
A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 113.