When the snow melts in the mountains outside the tiny village of Stropones, Greece, artist Achilles Kapsalis can be found collecting animal bones for his Psyteks sculpture series. Kapsalis breathes wicked new life into the bones, resurrecting them as fierce, bionic creatures born of his imagination.
Kapsalis is a lifelong maker, with a childhood full of creating the new and repairing the old, alongside his passion for collecting action figures of characters from favorite artists like H.R. Giger, Stan Winston, and Clive Barker. He’d dabbled in conceiving his own characters, but until April 2008, had directed much of his creativity toward making furniture.
The word Psyteks is a twisted portmanteau of psychology and technology, his own “healthy version of artistic psychosis” combined with a unique view of mechanics. Psyteks each begin with metal, his material of choice, as a foundation to add animal bones to, without the use of glue or welds, which he adamantly opposes. For parts that don’t dry-fit well, he employs the occasional screw.
Kapsalis sources native bones from Stropones and others from the internet. For the metal, he prefers found objects with readily identifiable shapes. In Gnathotek, two found dog skulls rage as one, spewing forth multiple razor-tipped bike chains, while the assemblage that is Otomorfius, the wheeled creature of doom, was once an antelope skull and a pile of industrial gears, bearings, R/C car parts, and a machine-cutting tool.
Though Kapsalis’ creations aren’t as familiar as the animals they came from, the sheen of the bones and the luster of the metal seem harmoniously mated and freakishly natural, like a scene from a futuristic fairytale where supercreatures roam the Earth.
Psyteks World: psyteks.com
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