World outlook and artistic act of Apostolos Kilessopoulos (page 2) by Yiannis Papaioannou

When I look at some of Kilessopoulos's early works on cardboard shirt backings or sheets of score paper, I can see an analogy with Halepas, who, after the near-twenty-year ban that had been imposed on him, found some ruled account books and drew models for sculptures on them in faint pencil. His imagination soars to fantastic heights. One can see a group of human bodies forming a structure that looks vaguely like a pyramid, one can see 100 human bodies that he was going to turn into a sculpture.  Kilessopoulos has this wealth too. In an exquisite way he transcends the limitations of his media and this shows, without doubt, what a superb craftsman he is. The beginning of his career, in 1960, fascinates me and I feel very comfortable with these, the first and, if you like, the simplest of his works, which are such fine examples of their genre and so redolent of the spirit of the time. In these works I can see the seeds of his future achievements, the thin black lines which foreshadow the compositions with filaments, threads and wire.  Cathedral, 1960 The "Cathedral" (1960) reminds me of the shape of many distant galaxies, whose superstructures resemble the pinnacles of cathedrals. Unwittingly, at the age of eighteen the artist recorded the seeds of what later, during his period of maturity, he was to investigate consciously, that is, universal structures and dispositions. The world's leading astronomers are at present desperately trying to understand whether the universe has only one form or not. We know the form of the universe on relatively small scales. First of all, we knew about stars, which are very probably surrounded by planets and planetary systems, like our own planetary system. We know that these stars belong to Galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars, as ours does, and that there are many billions of Galaxies. We also know that these form groups. Our local system, for example, consists of about thirty Galaxies, two large ones - ours and the Andromeda Galaxy - and about twenty-five small ones. Many such groups together form a cluster of Galaxies. A cluster usually consists of a few thousand Galaxies and is concentric in form, like a sphere which is very dense at the centre and thinner towards the outside. Today we are in a position to know that there are larger structures - superclusters - and beyond these, even larger ones. A lot of superclusters together form a string, like the filaments in Kilessopoulos's work, which suggest these dizzy dimensions within the conventional bounds of a painting or a three-dimensional structure.  Now imagine these filaments forming the sides of a cube, each side of which consists of numerous clusters, one behind the other. There are many cubes laid out in a row so as to form a wall, or rather superwalls. These walls possess a sharpness which approaches that in the initial comparison I made with respect to Kilessopoulos's youthful cathedrals. To be more precise, I would say that these universal superstructures are not directly cathedrals but mainly nodules on a straight line, the likes of which can be seen on the pinnacles of cathedral spires. I ought to make it clear here that Kilessopoulos's work is not influenced by telescopic images or the latest cosmological theories, but rather is found to correspond with them after numerous analogies have been made on many different levels. What we have here, on his part, is an intellectual impulse, a spontaneous movement which is prompted to create structures that often start off with different concentrations of dots, as can be seen, for example, in the drawing he did for T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. This image consists exclusively of stippling, that is to say, its basic graphic element is the dot and what is of prime importance here is the density of the dots, which forms different shapes, either oblong or linear in form. Although the word sounds a bit ridiculous, I insist on calling this process grammography, and I consider it very important because it provides a link with the Calligraphy of Tibet, Japan, China and even Byzantium. These are Great Arts, something which Europeans have never been able to understand. Yet the grammography of a Byzantine manuscript, for example, represents a great achievement.  drawing for T.S.Elliot's  Four Quartets The various shapes which appear in Kilessopoulos's drawings and other works - oblongs, lines, discs, spirals, streamlined shapes - produced by a concentration of dots or interlocking lines of different thickness, are products of the deep understanding he has of the Calligraphy of the East. The geographical position of Greece, her climate, the sun and the light, make not only the Greeks but anybody else who comes and stays here awhile behave like Greeks. If you want to understand what Greece is, it is not enough to understand the Art of Pheidias or the Hagia Sophia, but you have to trace its development from the beginning of the New Stone Age. I maintain that any Greek artist who is worthy of the name carries within him the genes of a 9,000 year-old Tradition. It is from this vantage point that I view the works of Apostolos Kilessopoulos. His understanding of Oriental art combines forces with a philosophy of life which is deep, rich and inquiring, together with a very wide range of knowledge that embraces architecture, sculpture, music, the cinema, and opera, as well as philosophy and the arts of the written and spoken word. These assets would - as is often the case - be useless if they were not under the constant control of a heightened sensitivity. In most cases where artists are influenced by Science and Technology the result of using these spheres of knowledge is negative because they do not understand what they are about: they try and imitate them, produce a clumsy imitation and the result is indifferent. Ever since Beno(t Mandelbrot formulated the Theory of Chaos everyone started discovering fractals everywhere - in Geography, Astronomy, Chemistry - and then gradually artists, mainly painters and musicians, joined in as well.  Yet fractals already exist to a large extent in Bach. I myself, before all this began, found fractals in Skalkottas on 23 different levels. One of their chief characteristics is similarity of scale. Similarity of scale already exists in Kilessopoulos's early works. This similarity is commonplace in Chinese, Indian and Byzantine culture. At this point I would like to mention Kilessopoulos's drawings. These possess a self-sufficiency and are, I believe, some of the most perfect I have seen anywhere in the world. In these we may observe certain explosive points on top of multiple underlayers of lines and dots. In these lies the achievement I mentioned earlier, of creating a multi-layered material. We often get the impression that there are three or four works superimposed on each other as the grammographic underlayers consist of varying thicknesses and lengths of line and black, ranging from very light to very dark, regardless of whether they are in pencil or ink. To describe these works with a single epithet is easy, though I believe that this obliterates the many merits they possess. One is amazed at the finesse with which he uses a small dot or line, which I believe derives from Oriental calligraphy and in his case lends an incredible sense of wholeness to this type of drawing.

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35th DEMETRIA FESTIVAL. CITY OF THESSALONIKI, 2000