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"Thalassa" is Vardopoulos' first video work and developed from "Thalassa I and II" (1992/3) which included a sequence of photographs of bathers in, on and beneath the sea, in which he used an underwater camera for the first time.(Illustration 14) "Thalassa" is also a development of his earlier photographic projects, "Driving" (1986) and "In the Underground" (1988). These projects combine ravishing and atmospheric colour and tonal presentation with an elegiac, plaintive feel and a sense of movement, self-evident in Driving" (described in the catalogue for "Image and Icon" as "a fantastic journey through the Athenian night, a night torn by the headlights of cars against a background of neo-classical statuary and luridly illuminated skies") and "The Underground" and less obviously in "My Toys" (1989) - isn't childhood the most frenetically active period of most people's lives? The video, which exists in versions for both a single monitor (shown here) and five monitors, retains these characteristics. It not only makes the movement a reality (albeit largely in slow motion) but adds a mesmerising instrumental sound-track which is ideally matched with the images, which dissolve from reality (sea-bathing) into dreamlike, mysterious abstraction. In Vardopoulos' work, as in Lizzie Calligas' photographs, the commonplace idea of swimming in the sea (Greece's nostrum mare ) is reworked into a universal parable about the evolution of man (as a species and individually), his place on earth and his limitations
Roger A.Wollen, from the catalog “Greek Orizons, Contemporary Art from Greece”.
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