The End is Near – On the occasion of the closing of the painting workshops of Athens School of Fine Arts -due to the pandemic lockdown- Prokopis Gazis (Piraeus, 1992), a student in the art department of the School of Fine Arts, composed a series of digital collages, which constitute his first solo exhibition. Maintaining his interest in painting, he uses images of different qualities from pulp publications, advertisements, movie posters and propaganda material to highlight a variety of layers and textures, wanting to overcome the issue of flat printing on paper. The unexampled work of Gazis includes paintings with obvious human deprivation and post-apocalyptic urban landscape during the quarantine period, combined with the presence of prominent political leaders of our time; Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Mitsotakis are presented as caricatures , as protagonists of a theater of the absurd in the society of the spectacle. The title of the exhibition, "The End is Near" concerns both the religious environment in which Prokopis grew up, and the climate of health terror hysteria of our time. Going a step further, he adopts the motto "1312" to declare the need to exceed our limits, "to kill the cop we have inside us", as the Lambs once said. Piglets and roses, a pavilion and the Acropolis, industrial rubbish against the natural environment, the ghost of Hitler - Mickey Mouse over the cityscape and the White House are placed in a brightly colored background, composing a modern punk aesthetic and caustically commenting on an era that goes from bad to worse . Will we be saved? Will we escape the frustration of the metropolis? Prokopis does not care… if he does not go on vacation, he will go to the kiosk, as he did this year. Text : Zafiris Nikolaides Prokopis Gazis was born in Athens in 1992. He grew up and still lives in Pireaus. He is a member of the punk band Corpses and an undergraduate student of the School of Fine Arts in Athens.