

Artist Portfolio
«The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.»
Albert Camus
About
Artist Statement
I create art to question, not to resolve.
Across painting, photography, and mixed media, my work investigates the instability of identity: how the self is assembled, performed, fractured, and ultimately eroded by time, memory, and the quiet absurdities of contemporary life. I am drawn to liminal states—where the boundaries between the authentic and the constructed begin to blur, where a gesture becomes a mask, and where presence dissolves into something more ambiguous.
Working with chiaroscuro, fragmentation, and textured semi-abstraction, I construct bodies that appear only in partial truths. Light does not reveal; it interrogates. Shadow does not conceal; it transforms. The figure becomes a site of tension—between coherence and collapse, between the longing for meaning and the certainty of dissolution. What survives is not identity, but the trace of its struggle.
My practice is shaped by existential philosophy and the tragicomic condition of being human in a world both indifferent and over-structured. The absurd is not an aesthetic for me—it is a method. Through it, I explore how we inhabit roles, reproduce narratives, and negotiate our place within systems that demand clarity when life offers none.
Rather than providing answers, my work opens a space of uncertainty—an invitation to confront the fluidity of selfhood and the impermanence of human presence. In that uncertainty lies the possibility of truth, not as resolution, but as awareness: a moment where the viewer recognizes themselves in the fragment, the distortion, the vanishing.


Biography
Angeliki Charalampopoulou is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Born in Greece, she combines her background in international relations, philosophical inquiry, and visual arts into a practice that spans painting, photography, and mixed media.
Her work is grounded in semi-abstract figuration, chiaroscuro atmospheres, and a strong focus on materiality and texture. She approaches the human form not as depiction but as a site of inquiry, using light, gesture, and fragmentation to shape psychological and spatial tension.
Angeliki’s process is exploratory and research-driven, moving fluidly between conceptual experimentation and hands-on construction. She works across media to investigate the shifting nature of presence, identity, and perception, developing each piece as an encounter rather than a conclusion.
She continues to expand her practice in Nicosia while pursuing formal studies in Fine Arts, evolving her visual language and deepening her engagement with contemporary artistic and philosophical discourse.
Themes & Approach

Core Themes
Exploring Identity, Disguise, and Existential Tension
My work emerges from an enduring inquiry into how identity forms, fractures, and dissolves under the weight of perception, memory, and social expectation. I explore the thresholds where the self becomes unstable—where authenticity blurs into performance, where presence thins into trace, and where the body reveals its own contradictions.
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Figures in my work often remain faceless, obscured, or partially rendered, not as an aesthetic choice but as a reflection of identity’s inherent volatility. They exist in states of suspension—caught between emergence and disappearance, intimacy and distance, coherence and fragmentation.
Light and shadow operate as conceptual forces. Chiaroscuro becomes a language of questioning: what is exposed, what resists exposure, and what cannot be held in the realm of the visible. By placing bodies at the edge of legibility, I challenge the viewer to navigate the space between perception, projection, and erasure.
Identity & Disguise →
Masks, omissions, and incomplete bodies examine how the self is constructed, performed, and internally contested.
Presence & Absence →
Figures occupy liminal spaces—never fully present, never fully gone—evoking longing, detachment, and the fleeting nature of human presence.
Existential Tension →
The work centers on conflict: meaning versus absurdity, autonomy versus dissolution, the desire to persist versus the inevitability of vanishing.

Artistic Approach
Figurative Expressionism Meets Semi-Abstraction
My work occupies the space between figuration and dissolution. Rather than merging realism with abstraction, I allow the figure to shift between clarity and erosion—constructed through gesture, shadow, and textured surfaces. Bodies appear in partial articulation, then dissolve into light, voids, and atmospheric ambiguity, reinforcing the instability and elasticity of identity.
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Chiaroscuro is central to my language. Light does not simply model form; it interrogates it. It reveals selectively, withholds deliberately, and creates psychological tension through contrast. Blurred contours and soft transitions disrupt certainty, allowing figures to feel simultaneously present and vanishing.
Texture functions as both material and meaning. Impasto, palette-knife interventions, and layered surfaces add physicality that echoes emotional and existential weight. These gestures resist smooth representation, offering instead the sensation of a figure in flux—formed, unformed, and perpetually shifting.
Embodied Symbolism → The body is treated not as likeness but as metaphor—a site where vulnerability, resilience, fragmentation, and transformation coexist.
Chiaroscuro & Light as Inquiry → Light becomes a questioning force, exposing fragments while pushing others toward disappearance.
Texture & Gesture → Layered surfaces and gestural marks emphasize impermanence, tension, and the physical charge of emotional states.

Influences
Identity, Presence and Absence, and the Existential Weight
My work is shaped by a broad constellation of influences across philosophy, cinema, photography, literature, and contemporary figuration. The existential frameworks of Camus and Sartre, along with Baudrillard’s reflections on hyperreality and disappearance, ground my understanding of identity as fluid, unstable, and continually dissolving. The absurdist clarity of Beckett, Ionesco, and the Kafkaesque condition deepen my interest in the tragicomic tension between meaning and meaninglessness.
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In cinema, the psychological ambiguity of David Lynch and the emotional chiaroscuro of Ingmar Bergman inform my sensitivity to atmosphere, silence, and interior conflict. Within figurative art, I resonate with the existential distortion of Francis Bacon, the embodied psychological presence of Lucian Freud, the exposed tension of Egon Schiele, and the dissolving intimacy of Marlene Dumas. The gestural fragmentation of Willem de Kooning, the masked social critique of James Ensor, and the corporeal hybridity explored by Nandipha Mntambo and Yulia Bas contribute to my understanding of the body as a mutable site. The blurred perceptual uncertainty of Gerhard Richter and the corporeal weight and materiality of Jenny Saville further inform my approach to dissolution and physical presence.
In photography, the spectral vanishing of Francesca Woodman, the psychological instant captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the experimental identity-play of Man Ray influence my approach to light, fragmentation, and the disappearing figure. The metamorphic, performative identity of David Bowie also shapes my perspective on the self as something constructed, shifting, and never fully graspable.
Together, these influences form the conceptual and emotional terrain through which I explore presence, absence, and the existential weight carried by the human figure.
Artistic Portfolio
Painting
Latest Commission: «Supplemented»
«Supplemented»
Acrylic on canvas, 80*100
2025
Series: «The Maurice Trilogy»
A study of identity, transformation and post-human condition.
Maurice is a persona I created, loosely inspired by Maurice Joly’s satirical character “the Success Manager” — a figure who embodies the manipulative elegance and hollow rituals of corporate ambition. In my work, Maurice becomes a symbolic archetype: a man progressively shaped, compressed, and finally consumed by the structures around him.
Across the trilogy, we witness his gradual collapse into artifice and mechanism. The three paintings trace the erosion of identity under performance pressure: the man, the mask, and the machine. Through expressionist distortion and psychological lighting, the series examines what remains of the self when the face dissolves, when the role becomes permanent, and when the human is replaced by function.
«Maurice Incorporated»
Acrylic on canvas, 80*80
2025
«Corporate Maurice»
Oil on canvas, 60*73
2024
«Maurice»
Oil on wood panel, 50*20
2023
Figurative & Portraits
«Nefeli»
Oil on canvas, 100*100
2023
«Embrace of Solitude»
Mixed Media (Acrylics & Charcoal) on canvas, 60*90
2024
«Vestige»
Oil on canvas, 102*72*5
2025
Painting Description
A figure suspended between presence and disappearance, Vestige is a visual meditation on intimacy, detachment, and the silent erosion of identity. Illuminated by a restrained chiaroscuro, the form emerges from shadow not to be revealed, but to be remembered—as if light itself hesitates to commit.
Painted in a limited palette with layered warm glazes, the work evokes both the permanence of classical sculpture and the vulnerability of flesh. The facelessness is deliberate; the ambiguity, intentional. There is no narrative, only atmosphere—no story, only the echo of one.
In Vestige, I explore the human form not as portraiture, but as presence fading into absence. What remains is not the self, but its trace. The last warmth. The last breath. The residue of being.
«Lady and the husky»
Acrylic on canvas, 40*50
2022
Chiaroscuro Nudes
»Noir vol.4″
Oil on canvas, 90*60
2024
«Noir vol.3»
Oil on canvas, 70*50
2023
«Queen Atalanta»
Oil on canvas, 100*40
2023
«Echo»
Acrylic on canvas, 60*50
2023
Expressive Realism
«Quest to freedom»
Oil on canvas paper, 40*50
2023
«Nostalgia»
Acrylic on canvas, 50*50
2023
«The Solitude of Thought»
Oil on canvas, 60*80
2024
«Symi island, Greece»
Oil on canvas, 40*50
2023
Photography
Series: «Fragmentation of the Unseen»
Annual Exhibition, Aigaia School of Art, 21-28 June 2025, Nicosia
The body, as a metaphor for the fragmented perception of existence is deliberately incomplete. The wholeness of the nude is denied.
Each image offers only what is already known—the past and the present. The future, remains beyond the frame and the absence is not a void but a charged space. A field where freedom and anxiety coexist.
The images pause and they sit inside the tension of not knowing. Acknowledging the unease and perhaps, choosing how to live within the absurd.

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025
Street Photography

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Larnaca, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025

Nicosia, 2025
“We have art in order not to die of life.”
Albert Camus
“The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”

















































