Demetrios Vakras was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962. He has been painting with oil paints since 1977 and has never wavered from his elucidation of the bizarre, fantastic and surreal. He is self-taught.

He has a great disdain for the pretensions of artistic aspirants whose lack of any real skill is celebrated as the quintessential ingredient that actually defines them as "artists". Australian art "culture" is such that commercial galleries have generally baulked at exhibiting his work. The only art that sells in Australia tends to be "Australiana" or the internationally celebrated faux-avant-garde; anachronisms from a century ago.

“avant-garde |ˈavänt ˈgärd; ˌavä n |

noun (usu. the avant-garde)
new and unusual or experimental ideas, esp. in the arts, or the people introducing them …”

Nearly a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp's 1915 declaration that "ready-mades" - that is, objects created by someone other than the "artist" - were "art", and that credit for their creation should go, not to their maker, but to whomever it is that declares them to be art.

And, it was 1938, at the International Exhibition of Surrealism (Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris) that Salvador Dalí exhibited his installation Rainy Taxi.

Since then the art-intelligentsia manifest the symptoms of the Alzheimer's sufferer. There is no end of art critic or enthusiast who looks at every installation, every "ready-made" and every "found object" declaring them to be totally new, avant garde! "Avant garde" has been turned into the recycling of yesterday's idea.  Yet it is surrealism that is declared an anachronism.

Vakras’ art is unashamedly surrealist, imbued with its own internal symbolism. His paintings, drawings, and digital creations tap into the human imagination. His precursors are the surrealists (Dalí, Magritte, Ernst, Bellmer) and symbolists (Felicien Rops, Alfred Kubin). Continue reading                                

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