Kostas Kiriakakis' monsters seem, paradoxically, to be quite humaniform: a gnarled old troll, bathed in sunlight, peeks at you from behind a tree in a forest with a long-suffering expression. Clearly it's hard work being a troll. A buxom woman with the head of a pig stares right back at you, her curves as defiant as the fleshy snout she sports. The American photographer Diane Arbus, famous for her portraits of giants, dwarves and other assorted 'freaks', made sure her subjects stared unflinchingly back at the camera as if to say, "This is what I am and I've made my peace with it." A similar normalising air pervades Kiriakakis' canvas, out of which flow monsters of every kind imaginable.
An independent artist born in Crete, the southernmost island of Greece, Kiriakakis recently moved back to his home island. Ask him about his penchant for monsters and he says, "I think monsters for me have always been an endless source of inspiration and fun. When photography first came into play, painters moved away from capturing nature to things like abstraction, surrealism, symbolism...the sky was the limit. The essence of a monster, on the other hand, remained untouched by all this. A monster is never really there for you to see, and that's exactly what I find to be so pure and simple about them."
His website Kappa Fanta welcomes visitors to 'The somewhat fickle visual landscape of one Kostas Kiriakakis'. Stylistically, 'fickle' is the right word, for Kiriakakis' work encompasses several radically different styles. This is amply demonstrated by Gothic posters reminiscent of artist Dave McKean's work, or a Yamaha ad rendered as a parody of the Mughal miniature style. While these are, at the end of the day, tributes, Kiriakakis' playful, mischievous humour shines through. Speaking about his fondness for fan art, he says, "I've always thought of fan-art as more like fun-art. You keep these certain elements that maintain the soul of an original work and put everything else in a blender with all sorts of other stuff."
Kiriakakis' output until now has been thin on comics and full-length narratives, something which he attributes to his late exposure to comic book creators like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. However, he's working on changing that. One of his stories was featured in the 2012 edition of Flight, an annual journal which features work by upcoming artists. A day at the park, a one-shot comic posted on Kappa Fanta brings the talents of Kiriakakis the writer to the fore. The story features two monsters; one with a box of Questions and the other a collector of Answers.
Speaking about this timeless debate between dissent and certitude, Kiriakakis says, "There is something inevitably elitist in thinking that it's up to artists to 'ask questions', although it sometimes feels like the truth. Maybe creative people are just taking on to themselves the 'burden' of making the Question serve mankind instead of just themselves. And, oh boy, what a burden that is!"
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