Qualia I
2010–2015 | Physical Works
The Qualia I series emerged from a sustained, embodied interrogation of form and perception. Working with oil, pastel, charcoal, graphite, ink and other mixed media, these paintings explore the instability of figuration at the edge of recognition. Bodies fold, fragment, and emerge within dense fields of gesture and sedimented mark-making.
Each work tests the limit of mimesis as both imitation and disruption. What is seen is never stable. What is drawn becomes a site of conflict between memory, projection, and surface. This period culminates in Untitled (2015): a final, large-scale piece completed shortly before an interruption that marked a turning point in Chronis’s artistic practice.
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
Fusion (2015). Charcoal, Ink and mixed media on paper
Mirror Stage (2012). Pastel and mixed media on paper
Captives (2012). Oil on canvas, 180 × 130 cm
In Captives, the body is subjected 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 by each other’s flesh and 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
Reclining figures (2013). Pastel and mixed media on paper
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.
Untitled (2015). Mixed media on canvas, 150 x 150 cm
This work marks the culmination of the original Qualia series. It is Chronis' last large-scale physical painting before a prolonged rupture in his career.
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.
An image that breaks itself to keep feeling.