Βorn in Patras, he studied economics at the University of Piraeus (1965-1967) and graphic design at Doxiadis School in Athens (1966-1967). Since 1985 he directs the faculty of photography and video FOCUS. Works of his belong to private collections and museums. He lives and works in Athens.
Through his recent work Takis Zerdevas comes to confront a problem which every artist addressing strictly to the spectator's visual perception is supposed to manage with sooner or later, i.e. with the relation between an image and an orally expressed narration concerning this very image or, furthermore, with the limits of substituting an image with words. Of course his choosing such a matter didn't come out of the blue; on the contrary it was inevitably expected exactly because Zerdevas during the long itinerary in his aesthetic problems has treated the representational weight of his medium the hard way, dealing with the danger of slipping down into narration in any given chance. And after having kept busy in previous work-unities with autonomous images in collation to an observer occasionally obvious and occasionally hidden somewhere between the structurally partial elements of the works, and after having transformed this very observer into an also autonomous image by drawing him even out of the given two dimensions of the traditional photography, he ended wondering whether the possible narration of an already absent observer and the one of a present spectator, may have a common syntactic spinal column which brings forth strong bevocal congruities with the central structure of the artistic work.
Demands of this kind standing as crucial points in the current linguistic models as much as in the recent neuroscienses, when pregnant with a constructive pledge, they become especially significant because, according to the results, they may increase or decrease the oppaque confusion that often on purpose is adroitly created around the very definition of the "work of art" in our days.
Zerdevas uses small and defined structural elements conjoined in a way that through an apparent repetition they shape, sometimes by their shadows and sometimes by almost imperceptible differentiations of inner proportions (i.e. transparency, tonallity, sircumscription etc.), a central drawing network which becomes the main modulus of distance, of depth and of transgressing the twodimensional limitations. But is this network able to stand as a substitute of a primary syntactic structute and in which way? Strong doughts have risen against Chomsky himself some time now, while the neuroscientists recently declare that mental representations are supplying us with the pre-conceptual net of all the "know-how's and the "know-that"s allowing us to formate word-meanings and furthermore to joint them syntactically (in other words to recognize causal relations between them). Zerdevas has every right to use syntactic structure motifs as a creative excuse, yet he ends up in structurally autonomus images that have no need at all of any supportive information data. In images that can be posed as starting points for syntactically complete narrations, but which they do not in any way establish the above mentioned possibility as major criterion of their own successful or not successful aesthetic function. And - most importantly - in images that point out the structure of a visual perception as of a different kind than the one of a linguistic formulation, i.e. as clearly pre-conceptual and liberated from the regulative norms imposed by the need for comprehending as the major factional finality of any language system at all.