A grid. That’s always where Stelios Pupet starts, the Athens-born artist born in 1983, whenever he sets to work on a canvas or a wall. What begins as a simple tool for transferring a drawing, the method generations of painters have used to scale up a sketch, becomes something else entirely in his hands. The squares turn into irregular shapes, warp, shift, until they form figures that look rebuilt pixel by pixel, following the same logic as a digital mosaic filtered through oil paint.
Trained at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he still lives and works, Pupet has built an instantly recognizable visual world over the years. His canvases mostly depict female bodies, often caught in ambiguous poses, crouching among succulents and potted plants, curled into themselves in moments of reflection that brush against mystery without ever tipping into explicit narrative. Alongside the figures, nature and animals recur as tools of visual simplification, surfaces the grid can work across with the same freedom it applies to skin.
The best part of Stelios Pupet’s method is its declared unpredictability. The artist chooses the shapes as he goes, coloring them, changing them, without a fixed plan in mind. He himself describes it as an element of surprise he likes to keep alive, canvas after canvas. The result is a kind of painting that rejects sharp outlines, where the eye follows panels of color set against each other with an almost musical balance, producing a suspended, dreamlike effect that never loses the figure’s solidity.
Pupet moves freely between canvas and wall, working with oils, gouache, acrylics and spray paint, carrying the same visual language from an intimate format to a public one. His murals have crossed Europe in recent years, from Eberbach in Germany to Annemasse in France, from the Wool festival in Covilha, Portugal, to Asalto in Zaragoza, taking in Belgium, the Netherlands and the Greek islands along the way. That trajectory runs alongside an equally broad exhibition history, spanning galleries in Athens, the Art Athina fair, and group shows that over the past year have taken him as far as Portland and Atlanta in the United States, and Australia.
What stays constant, whether it’s a small piece on paper or a wall several metres high, is the artist’s declared intent to create an image that’s pleasant to look at, contemporary, able to communicate something without needing explanation. A kind of painting that starts from an almost mathematical system and arrives, through the surprise of process, at something deeply human.
Stelios Pupet’s work can be followed on Instagram and on his official website.
