Dimitris Xonoglou’s painting – From the pulse of the individual expression in the code of the new iconography

The recent solo exhibition of paintings by Dimitris Xonoglou at the French Institute, confirmed our initial impression – which one of his works had caused in a group of 81 – that we are dealing with a creator with a completely original and new painting attitude.

So after last year’s exhibition at the “Scales” in Athens, his current painting deposit, with the unique atmosphere and the dazzling color intensity of his fiction, proved it.

Dimitris Xonoglou is undoubtedly a genuine representative of the new iconography or according to the test term of the Italian theorist Achilleas Benito Olivia, an exponent of the TRANS-AVANTGARDE, that is, the art that surpassed the innovative.

However, some clarifications are necessary for the art of the present, before we approach the work of the painter.

According to Benito Oliva, the trans-avant-garde differs from the so-called avant-garde on the following :

1. As for her birthplaces: that is, this new painting appears simultaneously in different countries and provinces in contrast to the avant-garde (after the Second World War) that hatches in the big metropolitan centers first and then starts for the region.
2. If the avant-garde drew its painting designs from the art of the first decades of our century, today it rejects such restrictions and draws its forms from the hoarding of all art of both national and world past. Thus the one-way origin is abolished in order for the tree of the new family to acquire deep roots that confirm the biology of art.
3. The structure of the new iconography, in contrast to the avant-garde, is characterized by a grid of subjectivity that does not autobiography but expresses personal motifs with elegant plastic language.
4. Today’s art rejects the illusions of the past (which had moved away from painting and tried new methods and materials in the climate of economic development) and returns to the real magic and power of the image, with characteristics of all painters, who derive from the nightmarish state of the world. Thus, Dimitris Xonoglou (born 1949) and his other international counterparts, like those of the 80’s generation, concentrate in their creations all their passion to transfer the intensity to the image – a dominant feature – in a free Dionysian color and formal choice. After all, it is the only way out to express their bitterness and weakness, in a world of rationalized technology, which has taken away his hope of survival, while the crisis, unemployment and the questioning of any ideology of progress plague him.
   In his current exhibition, his large surfaces, triptychs and designs compose an ensemble with unprecedented dynamism and color intensity, which only the subconscious and the return to the intensity of expression can give birth to.

By combining the expressionist and surrealist language, Xonoglou knows that these two tendencies can fully nurture his potential to paint his thoughts freely and boldly. The choice of the human figure is not accidental. He has already discovered, through the design deformations of his face, the passions of human nature.

In his first painting cycle, the figure is left alone in a fiery red field – fire that licks the naked flesh. Next to or on it magnified symbols, such as the telephone receiver, in the archetypal shape of a flute, the human heart and others that often cover the face.

Searching for the cause of human loneliness, lack of communication, the oppression of our world and its relationship with it, the painter proceeds to more complex images of his own fiction that does not lack a sarcastic mood and a certain religious mysticism.

That is why the expressionist portraits of saints with the fire of red that have burnt their hair or the other saints who coexist and complement modern themes, do not surprise, on the contrary, they intensify an explosive iconography that goes straight to the Byzantine frescoes of fire.

However, the above elements are not enough to talk about a new attitude and aesthetics, if we cannot transfuse (even in words) the charged atmosphere created by the fluorescent, strong colors, the images full of eroticism and allegory, its intensity and intoxication subconscious world of the artist, finally his painting delusion.

Because only in its strange human beings that mingle, fly or torture themselves, in a universe without limits, far from the earthly narrowness, can you catch the pulse, the emotion and the meaning of an individual expression that already belongs to the collective code of the new iconography.

June 15, 1983

Sofia Kazazi