Sergis Hadjiadamos found himself, almost unexpectedly, the custodian of a multidimensionally significant archive: the photographic archive of Spyros Charitos, a photographer of the city of Paphos and its world during a time when photography functioned as an authentic medium of documenting social life, culture, customs, and the history of a community—from birth to death.

While Sergis of Paphos seeks an institution capable of properly preserving and presenting this valuable archive and its historical and social dimension, Sergis the artist has for years been confronting the archive in a parallel dimension—one that concerns its aesthetic qualities and the images that time itself gradually dissolves from the glass photographic plates.

I had the opportunity to witness the packing of this archive in preparation for its transfer from a damp and dark basement of the Charitos residence in Paphos. Unfortunately, part of it had been submerged in water after torrential rains. Yet both that portion and the rest of the archive had already suffered successive attacks of decay caused by seasonal humidity, which, like a wood-boring parasite, gradually eats away at the edges of the photographic images and each year penetrates deeper toward the center, claiming an ever-greater portion of their representation.

These photographic plates—now amalgams of space and time—Sergis attempted to expose to the penetrating light of a digital image scanner. It was then that images returned to life in a completely unexpected way. The accidental layering of multiple images created visual palimpsests with interconnections that exceed any original intention of representation. At the same time, they retain something deeper that binds them together and transcends their archival dimension and value.

Thus one can understand the artist Sergis’s initial instinct to attack the very act of representation and the faces depicted within it. It is a clear statement that the intention is not to answer the questions of who or why. The priority now is to guide viewers of the emerging images toward understanding their true creator: time.

Time, which through decay not only gradually erases the people portrayed but also imposes its own characteristics—visually chaotic formations resembling the rings of a woody organism, capable of revealing cosmic explosions, measuring millennia, and recording floods and ice ages.

Thus Sergis discovered that while he initially believed he was merely competing with historical figures and their representation during the artistic transformation of the archive, he was ultimately competing and struggling with time itself and with its attributes: decay, absence, oblivion, and chaos.

Even if you believe the outcome of this “battle” to be predetermined, I would ask you to recall another confrontation: that of the Knight and Death playing chess in Ingmar Bergman’s cinematic masterpiece The Seventh Seal. At the moment we believe the battle is lost, the Knight confesses that a move he has made—one that has gone unnoticed—will grant him victory.

What is it that gives him the great motivation to defeat Death itself? Naturally, love.

But alas, his confessor is Death himself, who coldly responds:
“Did you really expect me to play by fair rules?”

Sergis, audaciously born on February 14, carries within him an unextinguished love for art and an inexhaustible affection for the archive. For years this has been the driving creative force behind the imaginative ways he explores its visual characteristics.

From the “cancellation” of faces he moved toward gentler techniques of alteration or intervention in their features—highlighting elements, isolating fragments, embracing decay, and even fully accepting the incomplete.

We arrive at the present day, years after the archive first emerged, where Sergis proposes through his exhibition “Whatever Remains, Turn It Into Art” something complete and fully developed.

Before even attempting to speak about the works themselves, I feel it is worth mentioning that each of Sergis’s exhibitions increasingly resembles a social celebration. An open invitation, a wide horizon of attendees, elevated spirits, music, abundant quality wine and food.

It reminds me of earlier times—especially in Athens—when after visiting an art exhibition you would leave nourished by conversation, encounters, and good spirits. The mere opportunity to gather in the name of art was sufficient reason for the host artist.

It is not simply that Sergis understands this. It is not only that he is now ready to celebrate the archive. Nor is it merely that such an approach suits his temperament.

It is that art has become his entire world—and he invites you to become part of it.

After visiting Sergis’s exhibition, I felt the need to write about what I saw and felt. No one asked me to do so. For me this is important, because it indicates that I encountered something I could not simply pass by without expressing it.

The works are numerous, the result of long-term engagement, tracing the entire journey described above—the confrontation of the artist with representation and with the time that inhabits it.

Emulsion Bloom

Introducing the exhibition is the strikingly contemporary Emulsion Bloom, a work that represents a failure—or rather the precise moment of miscalculation.

You can already see how fluid the transition is from representation itself to the time of representation.

A colored dot—the color being the artist’s intervention highlighting the phenomenon—marks the exact moment when the chemical emulsion that creates the photographic image fails. The emulsion detaches from the glass plate and begins to reveal its own distinctive aesthetic characteristics, which in later examples aggressively occupy entire images.

Associations arise with cosmic formations, galaxies, or gravitational voids of space, confronting the viewer with scales of space and time that are difficult to grasp. These are generative moments—despite their apparently destructive nature.

Before Sergis reached this stage of accepting visual failure, he himself had to traverse great perceptual distances.

Believe it.

Mesmerised Beauty

A characteristic expression of the attempt to cancel visual identity is Mesmerised Beauty, where Sergis intervenes directly upon the printed image using the traditional tools of the painter—the brush and paint—to erase identifying features.

For anyone familiar with Sergis’s earlier attempts at erasure, it is now evident that the qualities of this action have undergone a process of refinement that has tamed them, giving them characteristics that imitate the natural erasure caused by time in photographs.

The choice of monochrome, the intense texture, and the complex—almost organic—brushwork demonstrate that the exploration of erasure penetrates far deeper than simply concealing an image or canceling representation.

Something paradoxical occurs: an act of subtraction ultimately produces additive meaning for the work itself.

Liminal Bloom

When this act is not performed by the artist but discovered and revealed through framing—as in Liminal Bloom—one could argue that Sergis’s minimal intervention is complemented by internal references to the history of art and portraiture.

During viewing, one might recall Klimt, Frida Kahlo, Leonardo da Vinci, national engravings, photographs from a grandparent’s home—countless visual memories awakened by the representational void that can only be filled by the depth of each viewer’s own experience.

Out of Nowhere

Near the entrance stands Out of Nowhere, functioning as both an introduction and a map of the entire exhibition.

It is a wall installation of multiple frames of varying sizes that acknowledge the new freedom the artist enjoys once he stops staring directly at the figures in the photographs and instead begins to observe the marks time has etched upon them.

Only then does he discover landscapes that defy linear scale or narrative: mountain ranges, rivers, microscopic aquatic systems, cartographies measured in millimeters, kilometers—or even light-years—where visual measurement merges with temporal measurement.

Sergis has received a blessing from the archive.

At an age when others begin to develop presbyopia, he has instead been granted a new pair of eyes.

Almost Vanished Friends

Through the scanning of a single photographic plate, Sergis isolated the faces of forty different men from a group portrait and presented them as nearly evaporated companions: Almost Vanished Friends.

Spend as much time as you wish imagining the connections between them. What brought them together for this crowded photographic moment? A social event? An organization? A long friendship?

How many still exist? How many have been claimed by time—not only as representations but as living beings?

Do we remember them? Can we distinguish them?

What binds them now as a group?

Another cultural gathering.

And Sergis’s choice to revive them becomes a celebration of friendship—a value he deeply cherishes.

Join the Party

Humor emerges most clearly in Join the Party, where four variations present the same young man, this time behind a mask concealing his identity.

Beyond the new visual dimensions created by overlapping elements, the mask introduces playfulness, hinting at hidden passions and desires that images often conceal rather than reveal.

The artist constructs a party where the depicted figures and we ourselves are co-guests—a temporal contraction that allows smiles and commentary.

The characters become so provocative that we feel almost tempted to point at them—or, if alone in the gallery, even stick our tongue out playfully.

As strangers wearing masks, we become familiar companions—guests at the same gathering, friends of the same host.

Digital Intervention

One must also acknowledge the evolution of Sergis’s digital interventions.

The use of digital brushes to create covering patterns—which simultaneously generate texture and color—was initially easily recognizable as a digital device.

Over time this technique evolved into something resembling analog noise.

A work such as Era’s Elegance and The Phantom Hand demonstrates this transformation.

This aesthetic shift is not accidental. Sergis’s obsessive examination of images—especially under extreme magnification in search of hidden details—exposes him to the chemical grain of analog photography and to the organic patterns of deterioration produced by time: humidity, dust, and corrosion.

The digital texture he adds now enters into visual dialogue with this existing structure of noise.

It recalls something familiar to the generation of analog television: the static noise between broadcast signals—a noise that contains echoes of the universe’s primordial explosion.

Through obsessive observation of photographic palimpsests—revealing chemical structures and organic decay—Sergis has developed an intuitive awareness of textures that evoke primordial creation.

And as if that were not enough, the rest of his image manipulation—the seductive color applied to hair, the asymmetrical treatment of faces, the vivid red lips, the deliberately underexposed background—demonstrates a mature aesthetic understanding of the archive.

Rituals

In his most recent works, Sergis no longer extracts only representations from the images. He isolates gestures, expressions, glances, smiles—moments he senses possess autonomous life.

Among my favorite works are those belonging to a new series of rituals, where gestures and postures reveal actions, intentions, attitudes, and characters.

Bound hands, shy pairs of feet, broken body postures, the absence of identity, unnatural skin tones contrasting with harmonious garments—each element functions as a relic.

Moments later, the lightness of contemporary colors applied to shoes, the impossibility of the scene, and the surreal layering of images return humor to the forefront, allowing us to view these images without fear of mortality.

In this futile confrontation with an archive of decay, ghosts, and oblivion, it is difficult for Sergis Adamos to emerge victorious.

Yet his pursuit—to transform whatever remains into art—is noble.

And the fact that he succeeds in doing so with sharp aesthetics, living humor, evolving technique, renewed vision, and above all with continuous respect for the photographic archive, constitutes a remarkable artistic act.