Qualia I

Breakthrough Works: The Emergence of Qualia

2010–2011

These two paintings, Chant of the Dragon Woman and Underwater Dreams, represent the moment Qualia took shape, not only as a thematic inquiry, but as a painterly and perceptual methodology. Completed between late 2010 and 2011, they mark a decisive break from representational fidelity and narrative containment. Here, the surface becomes a site of collision: between the figurative and the abstract, the symbolic and the sensorial, the seen and the felt.

In both works, Chronis deploys a deeply physical, mixed media process, merging drawing, painting, scraping, and textural saturation, where bodily form is excavated rather than depicted. These are hybrid creatures as much as ontological thresholds. Myth bleeds into matter. Identity is always mid-metamorphosis. The qualia -the raw feel of experience- replaces iconography as the primary content.

Underwater Dreams (2011). Pastel, oils, encaustic and mixed media on canvas

Dragon Woman (2010). Pastel, oils and mixed media on canvas

Pilgrim-Ouroboros I (2012). Pastel and mixed media on paper

Sphinx (2011). Pastel and mixed media on paper

Ouroboros II (2015). Ink, pastel and mixed media on paper

Animal (2012). Pastel and mixed media on paper

Chrysalis (2012). Pastel and mixed media on canvas

Between Rupture and Merge

Mirror Stage and Fusion, can be read as a continuum. Not of narrative, but of ontological tension.

In Mirror Stage, form disintegrates under the pressure of recognition. The self is fractured, misaligned, overlaid with nervous marks and partial anatomies. The figure is not seen but splintered.

In Fusion, that fragmentation yields to another kind of crisis: dissolution through over-proximity. Forms blur, seep, and coalesce. Edges vanish. The body becomes boundaryless, not through loss but through contact.

Together, they articulate the twin thresholds of the Qualia I series: the impossibility of a stable self-image, and the impossibility of ever being fully separate.

Fusion (2015). Charcoal, Ink and mixed media on paper

Mirror Stage (2012). Pastel and mixed media on paper

Untitled (2015). Mixed media on canvas, 150 x 150 cm

This work marks the culmination of the original Qualia series. It is Chronis’s last large-scale physical painting before a prolonged rupture in his career. It is less a conclusion than an implosion: accumulated gestures, tensions, and material contradictions forced into a single volatile plane.

Angular forms collide with anatomical curves, muscle-bound volumes are carved into shards, and planes of color burn and scrape against one another: magenta, ochre, blood-red, lapis. The painting does not resolve; it resists resolution. Figures appear and vanish, as if caught between movement and compression, narrative and obliteration.

If the Qualia series explores the thresholds of perception, how recognition stutters at the limits of form, this work tears that threshold wide open. Fracture is no longer a motif; it is a structure. The line becomes a scar. The body becomes debris.

In retrospect, Untitled (2015) stands as a kind of terminal voltage: the final analogue discharge before the shift to digital reconstitution in Qualia II. It contains both exhaustion and defiance.

An image that breaks itself to keep feeling.

Oaths of Narcisuss (2014). Acrylic, pastel and mixed media on canvas 110 x 90 cm

In Oaths of Narcisuss, the act of looking turns against itself. A central figure, hunched and dissolving, leans over its reflection (or perhaps its double) subsumed in a field of liquid surface, blurred outlines, and broken light. The traditional myth is invoked only to be undone: a moment of vanity ...and entrapment. The self is admired, absorbed, pulled downward into image.

The palette, dominated by bruised purples, visceral reds, toxic blues, and diffused yellows, feels unstable, like something seen underwater or under anesthesia. Drips and scratches cut across the body like evidence of its own undoing. The mirror does not offer identity. It becomes a membrane between perception and dissolution.

The “oath” in the title suggests a binding, a promise or sentence willingly entered. In this painting, the figure becomes bound not by myth, but by vision, by the impossibility of separating subject from surface.

Reclining figures (2013). Pastel and mixed media on paper

Captives (2012). Oil on canvas, 180 × 130 cm

In Captives, the body becomes a site of subjugation. Not to an external force, but to its own unbearable materiality. Torsos and limbs knot together in impossible configurations, neither struggling nor at peace. There is no escape here, only enclosure. The figures are bound not by ropes or chains, but by each other’s flesh. By the logic of their own volume.

Lit with an eerie, almost artificial green, the background isolates the scene like a dissected memory. In place of a landscape, an operating table, a psychic theatre. Smooth forms -reminiscent of classical sculpture- are ruptured by openings, folds, and unnatural details: fingers cradling a faceless head, genital ambiguity refusing categorization. Here, Chronis evokes Michelangelo’s Prisoners reimagined through the lens of Bataille, or Hans Bellmer’s dolls stripped of all seduction.

This painting stands as a statement of intent. It encapsulates the Qualia series' core concerns: the limits of bodily coherence, the collapse of subjecthood, the horror and intimacy of form. The flesh is not as merely symbolic but as prison and proof.

Sleeping Beauty (2013).Pastel and mixed media on canvas

Squirm (2012). Pastel and mixed media on canvas

States of Containment

Sleeping Beauty and Squirm form a diptych of paradoxical embodiment. One coils inward with saturation and pressure; the other floats, unraveling through hue and disassociation. Both works continue Chronis’s investigation into the unstable figure, one with unresolved movement, the other with equally unresolved stillness.