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| APOSTOLOS KILESSOPOULOS |
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Cosmic concentrations In the last few years Apostolos Kilessopoulos has been creating a series of works which he has called Cosmic Maps. These appear to be the culmination of his whole development as a painter, which has been characterised by a constant movement towards the general, the cosmic. Its link with a metaphysical conception of the world is clear. His pictures spring from metaphysical questions, which have crystallised in the cycle produced during the last five years entitled Variations on the Archetypical Theme. Where they differ from other, similar artistic approaches is in the way they assail these questions in an almost scientific way.. His painting is extremely persistent in its attempts to derive laws from forms, with the precision of a geometrician. The laws it seeks are, I believe, the simplest possible. This is why, both in respect of form and on the intellectual level, it poses simple questions: what is the background and what is the foreground? What is up and what is down? What is the interplay between colours? What is light and what is shadow? What is dramatic and what is playful? What is two-dimensional and what is three-dimensional? What do 'concentrating' and 'thinning out' mean? etc. etc. It is no accident, I believe, that this painting in no way follows the current of the times, which, while posing complex questions, gives -both deliberately and inevitably- inadequate answers. The spirit of Kilessopoulos' painting clearly resembles that of those Renaissance painters who posed the simplest of questions in order to provide the fullest and, above all, the most beautiful of answers. His investigations, much less than the current tendency to negate the concept of a 'work', resemble those of Uccello, who strove to find the ideal form and to express it in the ideal picture. For, ultimately, Kilessopoulos is composing one single picture. It does not matter whether he finishes more pictures than a Renaissance painter would; I am convinced that he is composing one single picture, which consists of all of his attempts grouped together as a whole. The idea of the cosmic map lies at the heart of his concerns, from the moment he combines his metaphysical perspective with a scientific approach to the object he is studying, to the world that surrounds us and fences us in. As maps, his works portray a particular image of the world, striving to enable us, with our limited vision, to see what we would otherwise miss, just as in fact a real map does. As maps of an abstraction, the cosmos, they portray the inconceivable at the very moment that they create it. The most characteristic feature of Kilessopoulos' painting, in my eyes, is the concentrations. For a long time now, the central structural motif of his painting has been concentrations of colour, which interact with other, less concentrated, areas of colour or (in his most recent works) empty spaces. In the past, painters were obsessed with the horror vacui that characterises the work of so many Baroque painters. This is why his pictures, particularly those from the 1980's, cause an instant emotional reaction by their excessive colour, which I would describe as Baroque. His concentrations of colour at that time were so intense that perhaps it was no accident they brought to mind the skies of El Greco. Through excess, his colours were raised to new heights and became impenetrable. During this period we can see how his paintings were inundated with meaning: mythological and mystical themes, archetypical and cosmic landscapes, as well as constant musical undertones. Kilessopoulos's painting is tending to evolve towards a liberation from meaning, towards transparency in the use of colour, towards an increasing amount of empty space on the canvas. Concentrations of colour continue to play a dominant role, but now they interact with the empty spaces. Just as happens in the universe, the concentrations of matter lie in the middle of an obscure void, what photographs rather conventionally record as blackness. It is ultimately structures that emerge from the non-existence of structure, from chaos. One might say that this has been the central theme in Kilessopoulos's painting since his earliest days as an artist, yet it has become extremely clear and pure in his latest works. It is characteristic that the human figure, which used to appear frequently up until the early 1990's, has gradually disappeared from his work. His art, which was only slightly anthropocentric in the first place, has lost its last link with the human subject and concentrated exclusively on the adventure of structures. One element that was missing from his painting until recently but plays a central role in his latest works is that of playfulness. His persistent use of a dramatic blue background, which came to be the painter's hallmark, rarely left the viewer with a sense of playfulness, as the dominant sense was one of elevation. The painter's use of backgrounds of other colours (a fundamental shift, with, I believe, numerous implications regarding the meaning and aesthetic aspects of his work) has enabled us to view the concentrations as playful diversions, to feel the liberating effect of humour on the austere forms, to sense his new anxieties. In many of his latest works Kilessopoulos distances himself from the classical style (in Goethe's sense of the term), thanks toa self-undermining process in which the elements of his earlier work now return as ironical reminders, as playful ripostes to the spjrit of elevation. The three-dimensional structures form yet another development in the artist's most recent work. Of course, he also produced three-dimensional installations much earlier in his career. However, purely three-dimensional structures of wire and other fibres, like the recent structures with spheres, which form a spatial expression of his quest to portray the cosmic, represent a special development, which I believe is clearly connected with his investigations into the universe of structures. What in two dimensions had become an indisputable achievement acquires another dynamic in three dimensions: here too we see the technique of concentrations playing a dominant role, interacting now not with colour but with empty spaces. His pictures, without suffering from the sickness of realism and its consequences, still have a privileged relationship with life. Kilessopoulos is one of that rare breed of contemporary artists who are not afraid to ascend God's throne when they engage in the act of creation, as Flaubert once wished. From that position (perhaps the ideal vantage point) they can create the world all over again and give us an idea of what it looks like. His paintings have the tendency to reach outwards into space, to incorporate or even trap the viewer (just as our own world incorporates and traps us), to offer him 'infinite universes, each one of which has its own firmament, planets and earth...' (Pascal). Kilessopoulos's painting ultimately lies
somewhere between the metaphysical and the human, the cosmic and the
intellectual and this,
in my eyes,
is the characteristic of art that makes it still so essential, just
as it
always
will be. Alexandros Efklidis |
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