We Are All Responsible, 1972

Costas Tsoclis is one of the most daring, inspired and inventive representatives of the Greek avant-garde. He was a highly active members of the New Realist group in Paris, where he lived for many years. A theme central to his work is the ambiguity between the real and the fantastic, between the illusion of the image and its material substance. In We are all responsible, he uses collage to incorporate crumpled newspapers that refer to real events, such as the escalating war in Viet Nam and catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey. The torn, crumpled newspapers invoke the ephemeral news item that is soon forgotten and ends up in a garbage dump. Hence the title – “we are all responsible” – takes on special significance. Tsoclis intervenes with pencil to stress through drawing the illusory nature of the image. Hanging from a wire or dropped on the ground, the newspapers cast their shadows. Thus reality (the newspapers) and illusion, which is the painterly practice, work together not only to create a new picture but mainly to charge it with new meaning.