KILESSOPOULOS

Variations on the Archetypical Theme

There is nothing more daunting than words when one has to speak about the archetypical theme, and this is even truer when the speaker is an artist, whose realm essentially lies beyond the boundaries of language. The furthest reaches of his kingdom are washed -as indeed are those of language- by the ocean, in the depths of which the archetypical theme sings in a questioning voice. If the waters of the primeval ocean wash the shores of language over on the right, then our shores are washed over on the left, and vice versa. In poetic images the direction is totally relative, and movement of any kind remains imaginary, a consolation for us, paralysed as we are. We thus abandon the attempt to compete against those who have killed Poetry, for whom quickening the pace is in itself a high ideal.

When my teacher claimed that the mind can only think in two ways -through words and through images-1 reflected on how easy it would be to capture the infinite, and I would murmur an Epirote dirge, turning later to that type of music which possesses neither words nor images. In the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or the first five of Tristan -the former emphatic, the latter inquiring, yet both fateful-, in these motifs which are not even themes, could be heard the echo of the archetypical theme, detached for a moment from the roar of the ocean. Yet the same theme also reverberates in the fragmented words and images that the mind does not manage to read.

'Everything is separate from itself; it is both itself and its opposite and both are united in the same entity', admits Kostas Axelos in Ce questionnement, as he meditates on the archetypical theme, which strikes us with its arrows like another cupid. Our questioning is stimulated by love, though we are paralysed and have at the same time been laid open to questioning ourselves.

'If I paint until I drop, it is mainly because I want to well and truly solve the greatest problem of all', I write in Unbearable Sundays of Painting, and I go on to say: 'I am striving not to confine the world within a framework, any type of framework -though how would it be possible in any case-, even though I myself work within frameworks. Neither do I want to be held hostage by my own narcissism, which in this particular case is tending to become identified with my form of "expression". Furthermore, I am not interested in depicting or representing subjects but in revealing that which evades depiction and representation.'

In a similar way, the archetypical theme escapes depiction and representation; how could it be otherwise? However, its reflection in things, situations and the events of our sleeping and waking hours sometimes lends them the mystical aura in which they ferment and acquire something of the profundity of the question that gave rise to them and to which they return. Let us not forget that it is through the reflection that infinite variations on the archetypical theme are created.

Beyond a certain point the depth becomes strange, however much it resembles our familiar horizons or the heights and depths that are suddenly revealed, only to vanish a moment later. In this way we preserve our sanity, though this is no consolation. Even so, the game is played out on the borderline between calm surveillance and frenzy.

The archetypical theme loudly proclaims that it has no name, that it cannot be defined and cannot be pinned down into a certain space. Though indefinable, it remains present, in the most tangible sense of the word. Though archetypical, it precedes all beginnings. It jolts our collective childishness and most of the time leaves us as we were before we encountered it, relatively empty, though vaguely aware of the game that is played out between the emptying and the filling, the question and the answer. In playing, we put off growing old, which we strive to avoid at all costs. In putting off growing old, do we really gain time? By painting, am I perhaps trying to recover lost time?

Apostolos Kilessopoulos