The “Front of Candles” in “NoEMATA”— Personifications and Allegories from Antiquity toToday” the exhibition woven together at the Acropolis Museum by its director, Professor Nikos Stampolidis — to whom I am deeply grateful for the great honor of his choice — itself interwoven in the threads of time’s allegories, time that spends us, unspent, and “like wax before the fire… we melt.”
(we melt… each of us like wax in our own flame).
Christos Bokoros
What remains is an ancient lock, opening a crack of light in the darkness of oblivion’s iconlessness = ανεικονικότητα = non representationalism; the marvelous blue of a tormented cloth made painting; the little lamps and candles lit in memory by the painter’s hand upon gold-embroidered silks and humble smoke-darkened cloths; the worn woods with their old nails, the rusted hinges, the colorful scraps submitting to the strict geometry of the Logos to become a labyrinth of joy; the lost purple resurrected from the earth, stealing grace from the sun as it sets.
What remains is Pandora’s rusted box, filled by art with radiant hopes of multicolored dreams… What remains is the pursuit of beauty giving wings to the soul… The art of noble transformation that elevates the humble, seeking the sublime, opening the path of upliftment… What remains is the passion and love drawn from the ancient source, able to set matter’s memory free — to resurrect and transfigure, showing through deed the road to transcendence… What remains is the art that saves.
In 1997, Christos Bokoros came to Aegae and, in humble obedience, became the hand of his ancient fellow craftsman, helping to resurrect the ivory-and-gold royal couches. Now, at the height of his artistic path, he returns to converse once again with the ancients. The Macedonians loved painting — from Zeuxis to Nicomachus and Apelles — and Aegae was blessed to know the works of the greatest classical painters. It is, in fact, the only place where fragments of their masterpieces have survived to this day.
The museum, aspiring to revive the memory of the royal metropolis of the Macedonians, could not but continue this fertile dialogue with art. It is our great joy and honor that Christos Bokoros has agreed to be the first to take up the ancient thread once more, opening the…
Aggeliki Kotaridi
