Feels like home

TThe series of photographic collages by Dionysis Christofilogiannis, presents the image of a dystopian world, an unfamiliar reality. Characteristic sites of Athens (with the Parthenon, Lycabettus Hill and Omonia dominating the scene) and Thessaloniki (with its old promenade in the foreground) are combined with views of the desolate urban landscape of Syria's now-abandoned capital. These images capture and record our fragmented, irrational era, where no one feels safe, as the state of fear is bevoming entrenched and intensified by new, emerging forms of violence. We are all potential refugees, strangers among foreigners, in search of a new home, a safe haven.

Y.B.

TThe First Steps is one of Iakovidis` best-known and loved works. The scene is set in a Bavarian village home interior, bathed in the light pouring through the open window. Dressed in dark cherry tones, the grandmother is holding the blond baby, full of courage and smiling, taking its first steps in the world, on top of a wooden table. The grandmother has left her red knitwear in a corner. Note this dash of red colour in Iakovidis` works; we have also seen it in his teacher, Nikephoros Lytras` paintings. The baby`s elder sister, seated with her back towards the foreground, is waiting to receive the baby with her arms open in a protective gesture. 
First shown at the Glaspalast exhibition in Munich in 1892, this painting marks a key change in Iakovidis` work regarding his interpretation of light. The natural light floods the scene as it comes through the window, adding vibrancy and ambiance. Note the effect of the light on figures: all white and blond, the baby is dazzling. It thus becomes the symbol of emerging new life. The incoming light, on the contrary, illuminates the girl`s outline, lining it with a bright aura. The work exudes life and elan vital.

M.L.P.

One of the most important Greek artists of the ‘School of Munich’, Nikolaos Gyzis, an excellent representative of the so-called ‘academic realism’, also excelled in the field of ‘genre’ painting. Peak-a-Boo is made at a time when Gyzis, along with the rest of his work, which is beginning to show idealistic and symbolic tendencies, is also involved in the creation of portraits of familiar to him people. Here the scene takes place in a Bavarian house, but the three of the depicted persons are Gyzi's wife, Artemis, and two of their four daughters, Margarita and Penelope, while the fourth is probably a nanny. The triangular organization of the composition reflects the shape of the Gothic arch that covers it, while a lighting coming from the side window warms and enriches with reflections the fabrics and wood paneling in the background, highlighting their color quality. At the same time, it emphasizes the tenderness on the faces of the two women, as well as the form of the small child who bends down to respond to his mother's cheerful play. It is a happy family scene, with an emphasis on the atmosphere of warmth and security that the house offers as a shelter.

K.T.

To create the unpublished series Unknown limits, Yiannis Pantelidis obtained a special licence to visit eighteen prisons all across Greece, in order to study the zone separating the condition of confinement from the surrounding atmosphere. What kind of landscapes surround a prison? What kind of occupations and land uses develop around it? How is it that a rigid limit conceptualizes each single path, light opening, or muddy road around it? And how much pressure is exercised on this kind of limit from both sides, when the prison is located in an inhabited area? An open or closed gate becomes an insinuation of confinement. Similarly, the police tape, wrapped around tree trunks and crosses the frame, appears to be discreetly keeping the viewer away from the image’s field and the condition of imprisonment.

Pantelidis makes us confront limits unknown to us, since correctional facilities are usually located in the outskirts of cities or in remote parts of the countryside. They resemble heterotopias sown in the entrails of the Greek landscape, places which are unfamiliar even to those who live or work next to them. But how many more places are also unfamiliar to us? Are prison walls airtight barriers that effectively keep the worlds of freedom and confinement apart? Could it be that for many people, enchained as they are by financial, family, social and other difficulties, the division is somewhat blurred?

The aesthetic language of Dimitris Antonitsis extends from the creation of minimalist objects to a maximalist folklore aesthetics. In the series of photographs entitled Family Matters, the artist presents different family moments of transgender people and comments on the transgression through sexuality. The artist surprises the viewers by revealing themes and scenes from intense personal and family moments, about which very little is known to many outsider observers and manages to capture and reveal taboo images but also to stimulate inner emotions.

D.V.

Performance No. 1 belongs to the first years of Katerina Marouda's painting, when her subject matter was exclusively anthropocentric, constituting, as she explains, ‘a study on people’s communication and relations on an axis of eroticism’.

The private element, which appears from the beginning in her work, is indicated here by three colored stripes that frame the scene, delimiting an indefinite interior space. Eroticism and death are intertwined in the fragmentarily rendered, mutilated and bloodied form of the naked woman with the voluptuous expression on the face and a head that seems to be supported by the left male hand or to be an extension of that hand.

The desperate attitude of the kneeling man hiding his face with his other hand implies the realisation of a loss in which his own involvement remains unclear. Is this a crime of passion? Τhe horrible end of an act of domestic violence? Or maybe the result of a tragic accident? The two figures are depicted with an expressionist writing, with the color intensity emphasising the violence and the emotional charge that the scene exudes.

K.T.

The colorful work "Carousel for the children of Vietnam" (1969) by Alexis Akrithakis is a work, a revelation-protest about the "bad" war in Vietnam, for the right to life, for personal freedom and family security. The characteristic design of the artist, repeated and transformed, covers the surfaces and initially hides the sad theme that transforms from the toy-construction into a nightmare.

Akrithakis, influenced by the techniques of illustration, scenography and narration, created dense compositions with intense colors, outlines and shapes. He developed a particular style, sometimes lyrical, melancholic or sarcastic, and turned objects into symbols of escape and subversion. He dedicated series with toys, constructions, poems and short stories to his daughter. The expressiveness and narrative power, diverse and unorthodox techniques, subversive use of cheap materials and objects characterize the painter's production.

K.S.

The three photos from the series Cut-outs made by Alexandros Georgiou between 1999-2001, present the artist himself in different everyday home environments. As the descriptive subtitles of his works Dancing in my office state, Wrapped in scrap paper, silicone injection, Wrapped in scrap paper, cups, etc. Georgiou captures himself in different rooms of his house (office, dining room, living room, etc) as a tiny little man in a need to explore his self and his identity. The way he created these existential and autobiographical photographs reveals a strong executive dimension. The artist videotapes himself while dancing, moving, sitting and doing different postures with his body and then puts this video to play on TV and photographs the poses/scenes that interest him. He then prints them in the size of a postcard and cuts the outline of his figure so that the figure stands upright. Finally, these pop-up photos are placed in the various parts of the house, from where the final photos emerge.

D.B.

The Healer is one of the eight painting themes conveyed in a 3-dimensional form by the surrealist painter René Magritte. It comes from a photograph taken by the artist himself in 1937, entitled God on the Eighth Day, and is found in a sculptural version with the cage door open, and many painted ones.

In the present version, the closed cage refers to a psychological space, where the inner self is trapped in darkness, caught in its own fears and prejudices, unable to respond to the call of freedom coming from outside. At the same time there is hope, as a dialogue is conducted with the bird from the outside world that comes to help. And one can see the hesitation but also the longing of the captured bird to respond to that voice that seems to whisper words of truth. Is it a conversation between the conscious and the subconscious part of man or a reference to a process of psychoanalysis, in which a human being opens by providing the bird-healer with a support to step on?

The absence of the head emphasizes the difficulty of man to shake off the syndromes in which he himself is trapped, as thoughts, intentions and mental processes are also caught within the cage. And the empty hat, a simple semantic trace of the head, gives in its impersonality a universal dimension to the depicted psychological state, as we all carry within us an inner self that fights with its darkness, trying to draw itself free.

K.T.

In his free standing sculptures, the artist uses marble, a valuable material, and techniques of traditional sculpture to create exact replicas of objects found in the trash in today’s modern cities: packaging cardboard, polystyrene cases and wooden pallets, materials worn out or turned yellow by time. The arrangement in space of these objects, and the objects themselves, both in the Shelter and in most of the artist’s works, is an implicit reference to the improvised shelters of homeless people, and are a commentary on the marginalization and extreme consumption of our times.

A.B.

In Short Stories of Entrapment Christina Calbari assumes roles that touch upon the trauma inside. Staging symbolic scenes in claustrophobic spaces, she often uses familiar objects that refer to such social institutions as family and education or social rites like marriage. By avoiding carefully to present her face in each work, she delivers a body without identity that look as if attempting to hide within the self, to deny thus the confrontation with the reasons generating this condition, allowing at the same time a meaningful generalization. The viewer attends these interior ups and downs from a secure position, without maintaining the possibility of intervention as the protagonist is, symbolically, enclosed in the surface of photographic representation.

H.P.

The Dirge in Psara, on the theme of mourning for a sailor lost in the watery wilderness, depicts in disarming simplicity, immediacy, and truth a scene that the inhabitants of the Greek islands would experience too often. In a sparse island home interior, women and children have gathered to silently mourn the sailor lost at sea. They are seated in a circle (reminiscent of the tragic chorus) around a red fez that stands for the absent dead. The tragic figure of the father is depicted bowing, alone, in the shadowy right-hand side of the image. An impromptu iconostasis has been set up on a chair on the right. The overturned stool in the foreground stands for the absence of the dead, while at the same time accentuating the third dimension in the composition. The scene is filled with a restrained yet pervasive sense of tragedy. The painting adopts an almost monochromatic palette of browns, the only vivid colour being the red of the dead sailor’s fez. Sketching the figures in wash, in a confident, free hand, Lytras proves especially daring here. The Dirge of Psara is a major painting in the history of Greek art of the 19th century, for it not only combines authentic emotion and an extraordinary modern style but, above all, it truly reflects the life of the people, a far cry from the nostalgic, idealised, often saccharine genre paintings by Munich School artists.

M.L.P.

This particular work by Leda Papaconstantinou, the honorary artist of the 1stThessaloniki Biennale, attempts a new passage, approach and emotional refamiliarization with spaces which house the memories, anticipations and the needs of the people who live in and visit them. The selection of the spaces where these programmed actions take place isn't immediately apparent. What can Omonia square, the Haftia, Votanikos and Menadrou street have in common with Stavroupolis' Simahika, Mikra, Dendropotamos and Exohi? What can the economic refugees who live and work in the neighborhoods of Greek cities have in common with the soldiers of the Western Front who were buried in the Commonwealth cemeteries of World War I, with Jews, Armenians and Thessaloniki's Protestants?

S.T.