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The detail of the pattern is movement. I have been painting ever since I was a child, since the time I became aware of myself. Painting is so intricately woven into my life that I encounter insuperable difficulties when I talk about it, particularly in autobiographical form. Anyway, I doubt whether biographies get us very far. Indeed, they often have a negative or misleading effect on those who, in search of the easy solution, believe that they may approach Van Gogh's art through his madness or Beethoven's music through his deafness. Nonetheless, in an endeavour to express some of my ideas, I shall first mention a fundamental characteristic of my art-movement. "Words move, music moves / Only in time". This movement hat its origins in music and music's capacity to occupy space as it expands, borne by a succession of waves which, rather than breaking up on any obstacles in their way, bounce back and seem to gain new strength. Movement may also be expressed in a painting's capacity to relate to, extend into, or penetrate the next one. Music has always haunted me and, I believe, provoked my first aesthetic sensitivities. I can still feel the shiver which the Pastoral Symphony and Le Sacre du printemps sent down my spine when I first heard them on the radio at the age of about fourteen. The radio, a prewar Telefunken, was in the dining-room of our house in Katerini, placed to one side of the desk at which I used to do my homework, paint and produce stage designs. These latter I would later ceremoniously burn in front of my astonished younger sister. One of the windows in the room looked out on the Olympus mountain range, and the outline of its peaks is etched on my retina still. In
this mythicised room, which I always recall as flooded with light, I
heard these and other musical works and was filled with both awe and
delight.
They guided me into their dark mysterious depths and, as a consequence,
I decided to become a musician. During my first years as an architecture
student, I attempted to become a musician, but this has remained one
of my many unfulfilled dreams. Painting is silent, At that time I made great demands on myself and, I'm sorry to say, on others, too. I haven't changed. For five or six years -perhaps the busiest in my life so far-I was involved in painting, architecture, music, writing and the cinema. I also formed some significant friendships and entered into my first love affair, which remained unfulfilling, perhaps because of the emotional turmoil it provoked. In the early sixties, I devoured the arts like a ravenous wild beast. In addition to the Sturm und Drang that takes hold of youth and romanticism, there awoke in me a need to discover and comprehend what the Arts had in common, what distinguished them and made them autonomous, and the particular ways in which they could be expressed. If I opted for pure painting, it was, I fell, because of this six-year period of ardent inquiry which led me on to new passions and crystallised old ones. Ever since then, my loathing for compromise, borrowing of ideas and adulteration has remained steadfast. From another point of view, of course, any passage through space leaves behind its wake. The movement of the subject is just as important as the subject itself, and it seems that nothing is as restricted as we think, nothing is final or definitive, save definitions and those who choose to be bound by them. One of the reasons that make painting a difficult business is that one is obliged to perceive and express things and their passage simultaneously; put simply, by "things" I mean "form" and by "passage" I mean "content". We live in an age of fear and indifference, in which history -our own, that of others, and of the world- becomes a corpse to be dissected on a mortuary slab or is presented purely from a journalistic angle. Consequently, history suffers the same fate as old newspapers: it is either thrown into the waste-bin or filed away. Hence the question remains, how human beings of today can be guided towards self-knowledge. When I embark on a painting, my only, often frenzied, concern is to cover the whole canvas without any preliminary sketching or forethought. Then follows a process of developing points or features I find of interest. Following this is a process which is too complicated to explain fully, but which basically fluctuates between the hasty and the painstaking, the sparse and the dense, and the wild and the tame, according to the rhythm of the mood and the quality of my charge. I feel uneasy when I am not in control of the whole movement of a work. I do not mean rational control, but an interani control of a simultaneous overview of the action and its result, which leads the composition to completion. I do not paint a canvas section by section; I move across its whole breadth because of my need for the "image" to develop equally et every point, just like a photograph in the developing bath or an organism which, by emerging into the light, comes fully to life. One of the reasons why I am impelled to paint is my wish to save those things I hold dear from destruction, to play God who blesses them with the halo of incorruptibility-alas, in vain. Indeed, painting gives us the illusion that it has this very quality, that it is a mirror of the eternal held up before us: pictures that look at us with the same intensity as we look at them; others that entice us into their depths; works that create boundless euphoria or sharpen our judgement; magical works, sharp sections through time and what we call reality; works that function like oracles. Painting is not a window
onto the world, This is my conceit: to incorporate the flow of time into a picture, or at least to convert the flow of time into a flow of lines, splashes, masses of light and dark. Nothing can be replaced by anything else-everything dies. It seems a never-ending adventure to conquer form and to break free of it. Design, colour, line and sign are the elements of composition, but composition is more than the sum of its parts; indeed, often it is something quite different. Composition starts at the point where we exclude certain things. This inevitably leads to a doctrine, according to which we organise our references and inquiry. The question is how to cast off the doctrine and gain access to the realm of freedom. The relativity inherent in this concept makes it seem extremely fluid. However, nothing could be less fluid; it radiates from every important work of art. I believe that there is a place for freedom where there is a place for love-l mean they occupy the same space inside us. If we lose the capacity to love, we cannot find freedom: we search for both in compulsion, which corrupts us into mistaking quantity for quality, fancy for imagination, illusion for feeling, and dissolution for analysis. I would not speak in this way if painting were an intellectual pursuit; nor if it were instinctive, subconscious or emotional... It is, however, a cross-section through the densely stratified creature we call the human being; and from such sections blood spurts-and sometimes water too. Apostolos Kilessopoulos Translated
by Mike Fisher |