PAVLOS

The work

Socks
1969
153 x 112.5 cm
Advertising poster paper and Plexiglas

In a flat vertical display case, Pavlos shows us 47 different socks, with horizontal colored stripes, arranged in three levels on a gray background. They are made from cut-out printed paper collected from the printing scraps of advertising posters destined for disposal, collected and recycled by the artist.
The work brings together the advertising poster as raw material, transformed into a banal object of everyday use (the sock) and displayed in a Plexiglas container as a commercial showcase or street-side shop display

The artist

(Philàtria, Greece, 1930–Athens, 2019)

Pavlos Dionyssopoulos, known as Pavlos, was born in Filiatra, Greece, in 1930. He was an artist, painter, and sculptor who lived much of his life in Paris. His works, inspired by everyday objects, are made with reclaimed materials, especially paper.
This work was created in 1969, when Pavlos had joined the Nouveaux Réalistes group in the early 1960s, promoted by critic Pierre Restany as a reaction against the academic abstraction of post-World War II Paris. Several artists experimented with appropriating the banal realities of domestic or urban life, technological and industrial. They worked with materials and objects produced by the consumer industry, diverting them from their original functions or reclaiming them from rejection. Irony or chance are often included in the manipulations of objects to propose different experiences and open up possibilities for reflection on the viewer’s everyday life.