Old timber and rusted metal parts are central to Sorogas’s iconography. The scattered, broken, weathered fragments are taken out of context and placed in the center of large canvases, a product of meticulous observation and detailed drawing, emphatically presented in dramatic close-ups. The color scheme is limited: black, grays, rust browns, and sometimes red stand against the bright white background. The hint of blue among the objects and the background suggests the presence of the sea. The photographic realism and the characteristic immaculate style of the canvas add a documentary aspect to the image, emphasized further by the literal, descriptive nature of the title. Those documentary aspects, strongly contradicted by the poetic aspect of Sorogas’s work, convert the depicted objects into symbols.
Critics have referred to the poetic realism and the timeless and airless nature of Sorogas’s images, indicating a world of silence, a metaphysical silence, where the monumental objects are transformed into symbols dealing with the themes of the passing of time, memories, erosion, decomposition, and even death. Is it then by chance that in 1972 his first exhibition was dedicated to the poet Giorgos Seferis? Sorogas comments: “[Seferis’s] poetry is spare, charged, and has a rare conceptual and expressive density. What influenced me deeply is something beyond its structural virtues. It is the profound historical unity in his verse, the coexistence of grandeur and poverty, the eternal and the perishable, the timeless and the boundless with the suffocatingly closed space of today.”
It is almost impossible to ignore the affinity between the poetry that Sorogas admires and his own work. Through the circumstantial element of the location of their exhibition space – Citronne – the weathered driftwoods of Sorogas’s canvases are placed in an almost uncanny dialog with Seferis’s poetry. Directly across the harbor, viewers of the exhibition can see the villa Galini, a vacation house for Seferis where, in 1946, he wrote his poem “Kihli”