When I first saw the Japanese monastic rock gardens, I felt a sense of fulfillment since I could relate the sea of pebbles spreading at my feet to my own artistic work which is based on a sea of dots on paper. I wanted to find a way to appropriate these rock gardens, to incorporate their dynamic into my own work. I also wanted to transubstantiate the flat dot on paper into a dot in three dimensions. There is, however, a basic difference between the actual rock gardens and my own visual language which has to do with the material itself. In the monastic rock gardens that we still encounter in Japan today, after centuries of philosophical meditation and zen practices, the usual features of a garden have been abstracted so as to leave a landscape of only pebbles and rocks, the most solid elements of nature. On the contrary, the medium I use is paper, a fragile material, an artificial manmade product. Where the former welcome rain and filter it to the earth, the latter would dissolve under the first raindrop. The ones are heavy and stable, the others light and sensitive. On the one hand, eastern zen philosophy; on the other, a western adaptation. An actual garden and a poetic metaphor. The challenge one faces is: how do all these elements fit together?

Nikos Papadopoulos was born in 1970. He lives and works in Athens. He has studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1998-2003). In 2010 he obtained a postgraduate degree in Fine Arts from the same institution. Since 2000 he is member of the Filopappou group. He has also studied nursery and he has worked as nurse for eleven years in few hospitals of Athens. He has made 10 solo exhibitions and participated in various group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. In 2023, Nikos Papadopoulos presented a solo exhibition in Megaron Athens Music Hall, entitled 'Particle Garden'. The works of that exhibition were, in their entirety, directly linked to the artist's 2015 residency at the CERN particle physics research centre, and his award-wining proposal in the context of the Accelerate@CERN artistic programme, aimed at developing dialogue and creative collaboration between the natural sciences, technology and art.