After an apprenticeship in offset printing and later having been trained as a photo technician, he began his studies in painting in 1992 under the supervision of Prof. Arno Rink and his assistant Neo Rauch at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst), from which he graduated with summa cum laude in 1997.

The internationally oriented triennial, which took place at the Guangdong Museum, offered Kalaizis a very large room, in order to present eight large-sized paintings.

Influences have come to Aris in the person of his professor, during his studies, but in the most recent years, he increasingly has been inspired by the Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera and the British artist Francis Bacon.

Kalaizis constructs his paintings, which are often elicited by dreams, with the aid of elaborate staging and by building up large scale scenes at the place of the imagined action.

Antithesis is the most formative structural principle in his work, whereby the painted arrangements, which are achieved in this workflow, challenge and question that which is depicted, in order to bring forth a nuanced project of renewal.

But because his paintings could hardly be entirely classified under surrealism or realism, the American art historian, Carol Strickland, developed the term “sottorealism,” based on Kalaizis' work.

The paintings are often charged by a strange ferocity, in which everything takes place at the same time: magic, grace, harmony, and an unfathomable abyss.