When the world around us seems flat and despicable, we long for somewhere firmer where to find shelter. There are times when we fall down on rough stones with sharp edges one cannot snuggle up to, and we try, powerless as we are, to accommodate to them, to arrange them, explain them, making up stories which make neither heads nor tails. Excuses, maybe, a kind of subterfuge face to our inability to reconcile ourselves with things as they come and go. More or less like this, anyway, do we move away higher up and crave for the best.
Pushed around by life and its people, Theophilos stuck home the staple of history and set himself to paint its image, resurrected, wherever he could. Lightheartedly. His ingenuousness is not in his painting but rather in his faith. His painting preserves with popular spontaneity the solid knowledge of ancient technique as it survived even in the religious repetition of the Byzantines. Without the luxury and the dogmatic, obviously. And all by himself he sets himself to work and continues the whole tradition. Alive. With his own conviction and with his own sensitiveness, he starts Renaissance by himself and from the start. Next to him, “artistic”, “akin to Europeans”, modernizers and reformers of the retarded country. Let’s be like the others. Let’s thrive, let’s go forward. And him searching even further back. Picturesque. Such is the adjective the fearful of the herd often use in isolated and orphaned mumbling which gets lost in the distance. And the higher up you fly the smaller the others see you from below. Something other did he have in mind. He was trying to find his homeland. His blessed and proud land.
What is our homeland? Isn’t it our place and the solace we make up for her? Some of those stories haunt the place and preserve it for many years, regardless of defensive mechanisms and safety systems and any such intrigues to preserve power. When the need comes to find a face for the homeland, only one such alternative being could hold the keys to open up for us. Some in the generation of the 30s saw just that, in their attempt to find their own (their very own) condition and we acknowledged it. Today we say that we advanced. Try to deny it. Abyssal difference. As it is, there are always some such old stories to soothe us from our fear in the void nights of culture. Luckily, so we can say it could be worse. Otherwise… unbearable, the fear of hopelessness.
I consider the history of New Greek painting and I acknowledge even there an account of dependence on western European art in the last centuries. The same tutelage of the new borrowed state, the borrowed kingdom, the borrowed culture. After the “dark Middle Ages” and the slavery of the race (whose race?), it was high time darkness were enlightened. And together with the great masters of the School of Munich and the symbolists and impressionist influences and all that –at a somewhat lower level, of course – look at him, the sword-bearer foustanelas, buttoned-up doorman, hand in hand with the French customs agent, so that naiveté would also find its place in the corresponding assimilation of cultures. Were one to tell him that he was naïf, it would send him earlier to his grave. This said, what is it that keeps rescuing us in his painting, even today? Is it the naiveté or the dream which breathes within, together with the peaceful glory?
Who knows? History goes on and it mystifies the limits of human existence without fussing about purity, historic continuity and so on and so forth. Painting remains. Impartial witness and judge of Man.