Vangelis Vlahos at Els Hanappe Underground

Vangelis Vlahos's series of six drawings depicts one of modern Athena's most impressive buildings, the American Embassy. Based on photographs from newspaper archives of the 1960s, the drawings (all 2002) eschew the precision of authentic architectural studies, opting instead to play with notions of reality and fiction. The renderings--in black ink traced on rice paper and pinned to the wall--were interspersed here with texts taken from 1990s American rock music.

Designed in 1960 by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school, the American Embassy was an ambitious project. At a time of rapid urbanization and a flourishing Greek economy, the building, with its transparent, open structure was symbolic of progress and prosperity. Renowned for its clarity of form and a mathematical regularity that recalls Ancient Greek architecture, it continues to express the American cultural optimism of its day, in stark opposition to the cynical state of affairs faced by the 32-year-old Vlahos's generation. This ambiguity is apparent in the juxtaposed song lyrics by groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Andrew W.K. Pinned casually to the walls, they speak of frustration, disillusionment and betrayal.

Vlahos, an Athens-based artist and alternative space founder who received his master's degree from Manchester Metropolitan University in England, has long been interested in the history of esthetics. Architecture of the 1950s and 1960s was the inspiration for his "dream houses" of 1999. Reminiscent of Richard Hamilton's work, the series of black-and-white photocopy collages features images taken from postwar magazines and furniture catalogues, matched and rescaled to create desirable fictitious interiors.

With the newer pieces, such intentional nostalgia--whose fleeting existence is emphasized by Vlahos's choice of rice paper--was further counterpointed in the gallery's library, where photocopies of the mordant American lyrics could be found interleaved between the pages of architecture and interior design publications from 1950 to 1980.

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