I was always fond of Nafplio. I was a child when I first laid eyes on it, and it appeared as a living image of our narrated history. The small, modest capital of our newly established modern Greek state. Its rock-fortress, Palamidi, towering over it. I made my way up to the black hole where they imprisoned -who?-Kolokotronis. But in my mind he was always free and I breathed-in the blooming orchards across, gazing at Bourtzi as if it were a prized jewel. As I walked down the hill, the sea air cleansed all the bloodsheds, discords and schemes in the spacious cobbled streets of the town, with the public buildings, the mansions, the statues, the gardens, the water, the quayside. So I was left with the glory-scented fight for liberation and a bright breeze, a life-giving fairytale that allowed me to avoid the horrifying darknesses of ceaseless civil heartache and extraneous interventions.
Now I am returning as a painter, to exhibit my work in the branch of our National Gallery here. A true honour. I chose works connected to our collective memory. For as long as I have painted I’ve been on a quest for an identity. A quest to find my face. To make out what and who I am. We humans hail from others, we are not alone. The thread is long; it gets lost far back in everything that contributed to us being like this, to us being here. Our land, our kin, the others. And what of the ones across? Who will the ones of us that greet them be? Beyond the humanitarian and the charitable and the fine feelings all of us, more or less, possess? Who are we? On what do we agree? What is the common element that unites us? What is our history? Which ancestral tombs do we honour? What story do we have to tell about ourselves? How do we commune as a community? What do we swear by? What are our common hopes? What do we anticipate? With whom do we co-exist within the term ‘we’? And what do we owe to what lies behind us, to our dark past?
I possess no other trousseau, other than my childhood and the child I still hold onto within me so that I may hope. I wished, arrogantly, to reverse the tomb and rebuild it as a monument. Humbled within the context of the unsolvable, the painful and the troublesome elements through which life challenges us, I wondered what else man desired besides avoiding death? Are conveniences and facilitations all that is required to give meaning to our existence? Our life is a request for immortality. And what else is there for art to do other than to rob time and deliver the image from oblivion to truth? And what is truth? That which I consider unchanging, and to the best of my abilities, that is what I shall do. Beauty; is that not what we wish to find? That ancient element, the beautyful and good. That which is ever undiscoverable and ever invigorating. The unseen harmony, the virtue, the sense of measure. Life is a path of self-knowledge and our art is a task of exaltation. To raise our height, illuminated in the dark. To take responsibility and give back our best self, our own offering for the gift of life.
