The “Poster for Thessaloniki” by designersunited.gr is at the forefront of applied and visual arts, abolishing the separateness of these two genres and merging them into a new creative version. Respectively, the Thessaloniki proposed is a melange between past and present, selected consciousness, abstractions and vision, awareness and imagination. The golden element recalls the depth of byzantine icons, but also of the hot summer sun, whereas the silver element recalls the active present and the sea. The particular texture of the image puts aside the two-dimensional representation, inviting us to a visual, or in other words to a corporal, relationship with it. The horizon Thessaloniki seeks is steadily there, distinguishing between the two parts of the image and determining the past and the present of the city with a slight unrest. Secular and quasi sacred at the same time, contemporaneous and futuristic, the composition invites its viewers to become “readers”, but also to surpass the iconographic reading: in other words, to be exposed to the face of the Thessaloniki they desire and imagine.
Text by Thouli Misirloglou, historian of art, June 2010