Text by Gaby Cepeda


A spirit of unruliness pervades Theo Michael’s practice. It refuses to be pinned down, to submit to a genre, a media, a market. It is most definable as constantly straying from predetermined categories, and it’s a logic that is immanent to the works themselves as well: Michael is excellent at drawing, creating detailed graphite images that could easily belong in an old-world encyclopedia or in a natural history volume—and yet there is a pull, an itch, to ruin its suitability, its appropriateness. The impulse is dismantlement by pursuing their internal dialectic. The perfectly fine seascape of Political Sphincter (2014) finds itself vandalized by crude figures drawn in blue ball pen, a group of artists drowning in the vast ocean, heads bobbing above the waves as they discuss the impossibility of following one’s instinct in an increasingly homogeneous, risk-averse and homeostatic art world.

It is true that contemporary art is characterized by a total indeterminacy (it can be whatever) that at the same time is easily recognizable (‘that is art’), but at the same time it operates as a disciplinary apparatus that, as the theorist Marina Vishmidt puts it, can easily distinguish between those who can and cannot self-valorize. That speculation on one’s own value is, ironically, much more amenable and rewarding to those who choose identification, repetition, fixed identities and a signature style. Michael hates this: the immediate impulse after self-recognition is abandonment and veering elsewhere. The tendency is towards self-dissolution. Fixed identity appears in the extended Michael universe as an elemental precursor to conflict, and it’s the catalyst for an aversion to power that stems from recognizing the contingency of the structures that uphold it: mere coincidences borne of shared geography, timing, Darwinian delusion. Neutralizing a conventional career as an honest response to a system that constitutes itself through exclusion.

I can see him of a member of what I’ve come to identify as a select group of persons with a near-pathological life-force willing them to create stuff: more or less blursed (bless/cursed) people whose entire lives revolve around creating and being able to create. A compulsion that rarely, if ever, circles around money or profit, but is nevertheless unstoppable, usually since childhood. Thought becomes desire and it must be expressed: at its basest as a sketch, at its highest, any material will do. The revered thought must come to pass! And any and all available waste can be put to good use. Michael eschews the shiny final product to start from entropy, attempting to make something out of waste, of the discarded, to reconstitute it into something else out of sheer curiosity. The impulse is there in pieces like John Soane Would Approve (2016) in which a precarious, thin-stick architecture holds a square rock afloat, a NASA logo graffitied on it as it perilously hangs right above a scale model of humble brick abodes. Or in his monochromatic, conceptual sculpture era, where every material in the medium-sized pieces was trash with a sloppy coat of white paint. This povera character of materials is a must, and perhaps the other true constant of his work.

In that vein, his time at fundación/op.cit. finds him making his first ever mural paintings and they are ephemeral (will be unglued like gigantic stickers at the end) and mostly rendered with Comex wall-paint. They represent a more abstracted, but maybe also wackier, version of the interests and obsessions that have paved his practice: the idea of collapse, empirically, as the eventual falling apart of society and the institutions that keep it in some type of shape; but also, more widely, the collapsing of most types of hierarchies, of one culture over another, of one type of human over another, of humans over animals, etc. The larger piece is ‘all over the place’ in the sense that it seems to be mapping the wild ramblings of our conspiranoiac present: over here a molecule being messed with, next to a crack pipe, next to the black lungs of our planet, next to intestines turned serpent, all washed with some toxic rain and surrounded by weapons. It sounds dark but the treatment Michael gives it, is not: it is childish more than it is ‘primitive’, the colors are loud but not garish, the gestures evoke Philip Guston’s as does a criticism that does not absolve the artist himself.

The image is also surrounded by smaller exercises, framed like the panels of a comic: an urban nightscape, with the moon reflecting on one of those rivers that bisect the most European of cities; an aerial view of a rocky area flooded by a tiny bit of sea; a delicate oceanic scene, of a brick red rock and the mollusks that live atop it reflecting on the water as a stingray swims underneath. Collapse is only one scene of many in Michael’s universe; a possible end, but not the only one. The apocalypse already happened for so many peoples and beings in the world, all throughout history and even before it. This perspective is reprised in the second largest work, where a brown-red sky is heavily populated by chaos: organic-like masses seem to be falling from it as rain pours hard. The orange sun and the rocks make the scene almost look like a pre-historical cataclysm, the night dinosaurs were wiped out, but ducks and swans swim cooly on the water at the bottom of the painting—only one of them glaring at the intruding human, showing only his paint-splattered forehead and his dumb little fingers above the tide; there’s an ugly, steel building right at the edge.

It’s almost wrong to offer these little interpretations of Michael’s images, if only because it is clear that to him sifting images through language results in nothing but a stiff and incomplete mode of communication. It’s like we’re always trying to straighten things out, to iron out every possible kink and complication. Michael is always adding them back in, throwing a wrench into the narrative before it even has a chance to establish itself: it’s OK to deface the past, the present, we don’t even fully understand what happened then or what is happening right now, why can’t we accept that rather than our tendency to idealize and naturalize? We reify our relation to capital, to labor, to art, acting like we have no power over it—but those are all social forms, and they require every human to comply in order to reproduce themselves, to keep the foot on the neck. The cruel and original division of labor, the one that split intellectual labor from manual labor, and put the former above the latter, is likely the early injustice that gave art its allure and its autonomy. Without the pressure of survival, of the market, of the trends, of the ego of collectors, of the well-behaved institutions, what would art even look like? Maybe illegible by today’s standards. A parallel art universe that welcomes dispersal surely exists somewhere, and if not, we should create it.

Meanwhile Michael will stay the course—or more like stray the course, in anticipation of a future that outgrows unicity, determinacy, the malfunction of a fixed identity.


Theo Michael was born in Panorama, Greece in 1978. He is an interdisciplinary artist with Greek, British, and Mexican nationalities. His work has been described by other artists as “drunken anthropology.” Michael's drawings, sculptures, and mosaics use references from archaeology, science fiction, and natural history to engage in an exercise of constructing alternative worlds, where the boundaries and hierarchies between cultures and species have collapsed. Through an idiosyncratic visual language, Michael constructs immersive, quasi-fictional realms, inviting the viewer to navigate spaces where the familiar and the fantastic coexist and intersect. He has recently presented solo exhibitions at the George Benias Gallery, Guadalajara 90210, Expositivo, Casa del Lago UNAM, and Galerie Vallois, among others, and has participated in group exhibitions at the ACME Salon, Proyectos Multipropósito, L.A. Beast Gallery, Museo Anahuacalli, Pequod Co., and MASA Galería. Theo Michael holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Aristotle University, GR, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Wimbledon College of Art, UK.