Experimenting with layered processes of replication, accumulation, and erasure, Damianos Zisimou explores painting as a language through which aspects of identity can be either disclosed or concealed. Zisimou creates hybrid works where floral still lifes by queer artists intersect with landscape painting conventions, transforming familiar genres into sites of personal excavation.

Constructed through deliberate superimposition, his palimpsest-like paintings oscillate between transparency and opacity depending on the viewer's proximity. Zisimou begins each work with charcoal sketchings of floral arrangements inspired by queer artists, establishing a foundation that he subsequently obscures with washes of color. Drawing on canonical landscape paintings, such as Asher Brown Durand's The Beeches (1845), the artist gradually overlays one composition with another. Each layer, however, only partially masks the previous one, enabling Zisimou's flowers to resurface in varying degrees of translucency. And in works like White calla lilies and dark purple irises (2024), Zisimou preserves the faint grid lines of the work's preparatory stages, accentuating the material foundations of painting.

Motivated by the unexpected outcomes of repetition, Zisimou's recent series, Provisionally Untitled - (after C.M.*) (2025), presents three iterations of the same composition rendered in a palette of acerbic green. Viewed from a distance, the works appear to depict a seemingly integrated pastoral scene, but closer proximity reveals the flowers and other structural elements that underlie each painting. As these forms emerge and retreat across the series, shifting between foreground and background, they interrupt the assumed stability of the natural landscape they inhabit. The juxtaposition of intimate floral motifs-associated with ephemerality and decorative arts-against the expansive authority of landscape painting creates a productive tension in the artist's work. Ushering in a dialogue between hierarchical categories in Western art history, Zisimou questions how value and meaning are assigned to particular forms and subjects.

Clara von Turkovich, former ISLAA Curatorial Fellow, New Museum, NY