Some people buy paint. Alexandros Vasmoulakis makes crayons from leftover candles from the monastery. He also smashes toilets, revisits paintings he’s lost patience with and occasionally takes night walks with his eyes almost closed. Everyone has their methods.
The Greek artist started with graffiti and abandoned factories. These days, the work moves between painting, sculpture and installation, though making something still seems to involve a fair amount of undoing it. We sent him questions about destruction, control, boredom and whether experience actually makes any of this easier. He answered with candour, a little existential uncertainty, and absolutely no regrets about what he’s broken.
MELINA SIOUGA: What do you notice that most people don’t?
There’s nothing worth mentioning. I’m a rather ordinary person.
ALEXANDROS VASMOULAKIS: Before you understood what being an artist meant, what were you making? Do you miss making things before you knew whether they were any good?
Definitely. Ignorance is bliss! In my teens, it all started with traditional graffiti, trespassing, vandalising abandoned factories, etc. None of it felt particularly artistic then. Looking back, though, I can see how much those experiences shaped the foundation of my later practice. There was a certain freedom in not thinking about whether something was good, meaningful, or even art.
MS: What did art school teach you that you’ve since had to forget? More broadly, what have you had to unlearn as you’ve become a more experienced artist?
AV: My art school experience was very fruitful, and I’m tremendously grateful for it. Right now, I can’t think of anything specific I’ve had to forget. For me, however, unlearning is a broader, somewhat existential exercise. As part of my everyday routine, I play several meditative games: taking night walks with my eyes almost closed, chanting nonsense syllables, visualising with my eyes closed, practising mindfulness, and so on. I love these games; they’re great fun. Their intention is to temporarily step outside my mind's habitual workings and explore different states of consciousness. While playing, I try to let go of accumulated knowledge, assumptions, and conventional distinctions: “here” and “there,” “subject” and “object,” “inside” and “outside,” and so on. I’m interested in what remains as these distinctions dissolve: a more immediate, unmediated experience that exists beyond the structures of narrative and language.
The partly abstract, partly figurative forms in my compositions are directly fuelled by these exercises. In a way, they try to give form to experiences that are difficult, perhaps even impossible, to articulate: states of perception that exist outside our ordinary, language-based way of understanding reality. So, rather than thinking of unlearning as forgetting something I was taught, I think of it as temporarily suspending what I already know in order to encounter experience more directly.
MS: How much control do you actually want? And at what point does control start getting in the way of the work?
AV: Control and surrender feel like a kind of tug-of-war. Surrender comes from my stomach, whereas control is much more cerebral. Surrender takes me into places where there is less and less of me; control arrives later and tries to organise what I’ve found, tidy it up, and make it presentable. I need both, but I have to be careful about which one gets there first.
MS: Destruction has been part of your process for a long time. What does destroying something give you that creating it can’t?
AV: I don’t really see destruction and creation as opposites. In my practice, very few things come together effortlessly. Behind every form that works, there are countless others that were attempted, struggled with, and ultimately didn’t make it. Failure and destruction are therefore already embedded in the process of creating. I also love working on older pieces of mine that I find mediocre. There is something almost liberating about destroying or transforming an earlier version of myself in the hope of improving it, even if only slightly. It’s a way to talk to my past self, and sometimes to kill off an old version of myself so something else can emerge.
In some of my recent sculptural mosaic works, this becomes quite literal. I smash porcelain sinks and toilets and then rebuild them by assembling their fragments into something new. I find the sound and physicality of the breaking porcelain incredibly exciting. There is a strange pleasure in the moment of destruction, but what interests me most is what comes after: the possibility of turning the fragments into something that could not have existed without breaking them.
MS: Have you ever destroyed a work, or part of one, and immediately regretted it? What did ruining it teach you?
AV: No. I’ve never regretted destroying a work, even when the destruction didn’t ultimately lead to a better outcome. When I doubt a work, those doubts tend to snowball over time rather than disappear. I can leave a painting alone for weeks or months, but if something keeps bothering me, the feeling usually grows stronger. At a certain point, there is an almost desperate need for change, and destruction becomes inevitable. This back-and-forth happens again and again with almost every work I make. I build something, question it, destroy part of it, rebuild it, question it again. In that sense, my works are literally palimpsests. They contain traces of their previous versions, even when those versions are no longer visible.
MS: When was the last time you genuinely had no idea what you were doing? Does that feeling become more frightening with experience, or more necessary?
AV: So far in my practice, I’ve worked in four completely different styles, each lasting between five and eleven years. During those transitions, I tried to leave everything behind and start from scratch. Each time, I was genuinely and profoundly lost. Looking back, I’m not even sure I knew what I was doing. I reacted to circumstances rather than following a strategy. In retrospect, those periods of uncertainty were probably necessary. They forced me to let go of what I already knew and make room for something new.
MS: What’s the best mistake you’ve made recently? Can you recognise a useful accident while it’s happening, or only afterwards?
AV: The most recent one happened last year. It was a paper pulp accident. I’m afraid it’s problematic that I have nothing more recent to mention. It makes me realise that lately I have been playing it safe, not taking risks. That needs to change ASAP!
MS: If you knew exactly what a painting was going to become before you started it, would there be any reason to make it?
AV: This is exactly how I used to work many moons ago. I would have a specific drawing, and my goal was to render it on a canvas or wall as close to the original idea as possible. In my current practice, I do no preparation. I still make drawings, but they all happen directly on the canvas. The work will make countless U-turns before finally settling into its final form. It is a lengthy and laborious way of working. Nevertheless, it leaves a surface rich in texture, with some erased mistakes still echoing in the final result. I like that. There is also something exciting about not knowing where the work is heading. Comparing my old practice with my current one, I would say that the former feels like a well-organised trip, where you know exactly where you are going, while the latter is more like playing the flâneur: wandering without a fixed destination and having no clue where things will lead next. For me, that uncertainty has become an essential part of the process.
MS: You make crayons from remnants of beeswax candles collected from monasteries, material that has already existed inside somebody else’s ritual, belief or prayer. Does knowing where a material has been change what it becomes in your hands? Do materials remember?
AV: Going to an art supplies store and buying tubes of oil paint is convenient, but it can also feel dry and mundane. I love rituals, and making my own painting medium is a sort of ritual in itself. It can be tiring and time-consuming, but it pays off. I think painting becomes more meaningful and richer when the painter dives deeper into its materiality. Knowing where a material has come from inevitably adds another layer to the process. The beeswax already has a history embedded in it: candles that have burned inside monasteries, in rituals and prayers, before becoming part of my work. I don’t know if materials literally remember, but I like the idea that they can carry traces of what they have been through.
MS: Years ago you spoke about moving between different kinds of work partly as a way of avoiding boredom. Do you still think an artist should escape boredom, or have you learned to stay in the room with it?
AV: The latter! Boredom can be quite educative. Sometimes, it can point me in directions I never would have imagined. I’ve learned not to rush to escape it.
MS: When you look back at the person making those enormous works on the streets twenty years ago, do you recognise him? What did he understand that you may have forgotten, and what do you know now that he probably wouldn’t have believed?
AV: Certainly, I don’t! That guy back then had enormous audacity, which was essential in the street art context. My current self is much more careful about what I put out into the world. He likely wouldn’t have believed in the value of slowness, prudence, and patience. Back then, I was driven by a kind of urgency: to act, to occupy spaces. Today, I’m more interested in taking my time, questioning my decisions, and allowing things to develop slowly. I wouldn’t say that one approach is better than the other; they simply belong to different stages of my life and practice.
MS: What from Athens exists in your work that you never consciously put there?
AV: Perhaps it’s roughness and noisiness.
MS: How do you know when you’ve developed a visual language and when you’ve simply developed a formula? Is there anything people recognise in your work that you never want to become your signature?
AV: I don’t have a clue about that!
MS: Do you need to understand your own work?
AV: Yes, but I don’t think understanding necessarily has to be intellectual. I’m interested in forms of understanding that precede or exist outside cognition, an embodied kind of knowing. When I can fully account for an artwork's mechanics and logic, I usually lose interest in it. What keeps me engaged is the mystery: the sense that something there resists being reduced to knowledge.
MS: What are you still trying to see?
AV: I want to see what I don’t yet know how to see.