A conversation with Antaios Chrysostomidis

I consider myself a painter

of the human soul

Dimitris Xonoglou

– What were the dominant tendencies in art during your formative years? Whose child do you consider yourself to be?

– I consider myself the child of artists, not art movements. Of course art movements, all the various -isms, were created by artists. You can be at odds with an -ism, and still appreciate an artist representing it. From the very beginning, I was interested more in specific artists rather than art movements.

– Have you always known you would become a painter?

– Ever since I was a child, I knew I wanted to study Fine Arts. I was never in doubt about what I wanted to do with my life. For me, art was a primary need, and no one could compel me to study anything else.

– It seems like you believe one is born a painter…

– Yes, I do. Then of course you get involved in this rather painful process; you carry a heavy load on your shoulders, the burden of the history of art. All that has been accomplished in painting before you. So, as you strive to develop your own style, you simply cannot ignore the history of art since the first day of our species’ presence on this planet.

– Has this burden ever inhibited you in any way? Were there times you doubted yourself, asking “where I am going? What can I contribute to all this heritage?”

– You can never escape this question. Sometimes, you just need to take a step back. Often, this is a useful thing to do, because by taking a step back you can see things in a different light. What I mean is that I could never ignore the art of El Greco, Rembrandt, Raphael or Velázquez. It would be unthinkable to claim I have no interest in Caravaggio or the Byzantine painter Panselinos. I consider them my grandparents. Them and many others.

– Do you feel they all exist somehow in your work?

– I do feel they are present in my work. I feel I have a unique relationship with every one of them. Let me illustrate this point. Until recently, I distasted Raphael, but I couldn’t put my finger on the reason. Whereas I have always appreciated Michelangelo, Leonardo and Botticelli, I felt this aversion for Raphael. I thought his work was too corny. Only recently, after revisiting his work, there was a chink of light. After studying his work from scratch, this chink. eventually turned into an open door, with light flooding through. I realized then that Raphael was an artist on par with the peers I mentioned – and a particularly knowledgeable artist at that.

– What about later painters?

– I also cannot ignore them. I cannot ignore Picasso, whom I consider a great 20th century innovator. When I see his work, I feel like being in a torture chamber, with my tormentor dropping scalding metal on my abdomen. It feels like an electrocution. This is not something I would say about others, Dali for example. I also cannot ignore Matisse, even though his undoubtedly beautiful paintings are very bourgeois, his art flatters this social class. What I mean is that artists are influenced by many other artists, and are then free to nibble from each one. Some artists are your brothers, others are your cousins, and others still are your distant relatives. How could I ever ignore Pollock, the reformer of contemporary American art? For me, Pollock is a sublime chef of pasta, who creates magnificent sauces – and I am a great fan of pasta. Pollock is the genius who broke every genetic code in the history of art, opening up new and one-way destinations. He bravely used the almost autistic technique of dripping and the drip. I do believe that; but I also believe that, in the end, he was a meticulous, self-destructive chimp.

-Why a chimp?

– Because he let his own work to lead him to a deadlock. He did not go any further. For more than a decade, he just repeated himself always using the same technique. This is why is ended up killing himself.

– Is there no end to this search? I mean, after the Black Square of Malevich, shouldn’t painting take a step back to survive?

– We are all entitled to death, the same way we are entitled to resurrection.

– How would you sum up the major characteristics and philosophy of your work?

– I have only one answer to this question: even the most impulsive and explosive brushstroke of an artist follows the laws of perception and mental processing. I am not sure whether artists decide on a set of premises beforehand, or if they just discover them on the way. I would say artists simply set general goals. To give you an example, I now know why I created my book burning series. But I did not know it when I was actually creating it. There are always subjective elements and external influences that make you take this and not the other choice. If art was impervious to life, it would be a dry, lifeless construct.

– Your work includes scorched books, broken dishes, inedible pieces of bread, perforated beds, chandeliers nailed on the floor, umbrellas turned upside down… You seem to take familiar objects and then subvert their ordinary uses to give them new meanings. The scorched books, for example, dressed with gold leaves mixed with wax, look almost religious, evoking Byzantine icons. Marx’s Chair is intensely allegorical. The bed is a wave. What I want to ask you is, first, why do you feel this need for subversion, and, second, if you are driven by aesthetic considerations. Is it the aesthetic element that interests you most in the image of a chandelier nailed upside-down on a bed?

– My practice is to appropriate familiar, ordinary objects and give them a new function and meaning. Other than that, everything we ever do is related to aesthetics. To aesthetics and morality.

– What about symbolism? Does symbolism interest you?

Symbolism comes out naturally. It depends on how the audience perceives my work. I give viewers the freedom to see what they want in my work.

Look, I think of myself as a painter of the human soul, of the non-corporeal substance of people. I am not a painter of nature or world events. As I mentioned before, events do influence me, but they appear in my work filtered through my own personality and perspective. Since it bores me to do the same things repeatedly, my work is very diverse. This variety has only one common denominator: me. It makes me happy to hear people tell me that they have recognized me as the creator of an artwork without knowing the artist beforehand. I would never spend fifty years working on the same form, motif or material.

– Do you consciously decide on the new directions your work takes? I mean, is there any intense soul-searching between the different phases of your work or do ideas just spring from inside as you mature as an artist?

– I would say that the new material always reveals itself. A theme always goes hand in hand with its matching material.
Every new idea is born together with the material that is appropriate for its expression. I might say my ideas are born out of thin air. That they are like “dictated whispers”, as Dimoula once defined inspiration. I fully subscribe to this definition. A strange thing happens: before I have finished working on a series, I can imagine how my works will look like once completed and exhibited.

– Are you always satisfied with the implementation of your ideas or do you sometimes think that the result could have been better?

– Yes, I have often thought the result could have been better, but at least I try to prevent it from being even worse.

-Do you ever revisit an old idea, one that you have already implemented, or does implementation bring the death of the idea?

– I sometimes revisit a similar form, but never the exact same. For example, when I started burning books – here I should make something very clear: by book burning I mean burning copies of some books. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding.

– Some people attacked you for this…

– Yes. They were the same people who failed to understand that I was not burning the book as a symbol – books were just a material, like thousands of other materials, paint, wax, wood, bread.

– Did you select specific books for the burning?

– ΣInitially, I burnt all the Marxist books I had kept in my library from my student years. And I did that long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Later on, I started burning books randomly.

I have to say here that burning the books came at a later stage. Before that, I would deform books in various ways, for example by attaching pieces of wood or dice on their pages, changing their illustrations and colors, etc. I used fire later, mainly to show that fire can be both a creative and a destructive force. One of the things that I like about burning is the colors created by the fire: they range from light blond to dark brown. There are many different earth tone colors.

Besides, books can be read in many different ways. For example, you could read at random the half-burnt fragments from different pages, creating a new meaning.

– As in the case of the Derveni papyrus…

– Exactly!

– You mentioned before that aesthetic quality is necessary. It has been well documented that art, ever since antiquity – Eco confirmed this in his recently published History of Beauty – has been closely related to beauty. Even when artists depicted the grotesque, the inferno for instance, they would present it in a beautiful way. Their works might be scary, but they also impressed you with their aesthetic qualities. The same could be said about the gargoyles in gothic churches. They are beautiful, awe-inspiring sculptures. More recently, however, art, in an obvious attempt to capture the hardships of the present times, seems to be scorning beauty, intentionally seeking out the grotesque. Do you think this tendency leads nowhere? One of the most important painters of our time, Lucian Freud, earned his place in art history books for his grotesque figure paintings. Even the meat hooks of Kounellis can be considered beautiful..

– Beauty ideals change over the years. The ideals of the ancient Greeks, exemplified by Hermes of Praxiteles, were totally different from our own.

– Hermes, though, is still a beauty ideal.

– Certainly. But for us, Picasso’s Guernica is also beautiful. I am not sure that the ancient Greeks would appreciate it as much. Today, we may think of a meat hook as beautiful. You know what Kounellis reminds me of? He reminds me of a fetus surrounded by amniotic fluid and feeling the mother’s body made not only of flesh, but of tender sheets of iron. In other words, I think that Kounellis is both a genuine realist, and a devoted romantic. By the same token, I find beautiful the superfluous flesh we see in Freud’s works, those plump bodies overflowing from couches. And why shouldn’t I? Should we consider only slender bodies as beautiful? Should Twiggy be our ideal of beauty? Aren’t the female figures of Rubens also beautiful? Freud does not do anything different. He is the Rubens of the 20th century.

– In other words, you don’t think that art, or culture for that matter, is in a state of crisis.

– You are talking about two entirely different things. There is indeed a cultural crisis, but it has to do with politics and society. It is related to human behavior and psychology. The arts, on the other hand, have never been in crisis. And they never will.

– Your work presented in the Biennale has direct references to History. Do you believe we learn from History? What are the important lessons we could learn from History today?

– First, I have to say that we should never remove myths and folktales from history. Historical events, no matter how painful, lose their magic and hence their power when their mythical elements are taken away. This is why, for example, some see the dramatic massacre on the Smyrna pier as a simple case of… overcrowding. In this case, History not only teaches us nothing, but distorts the past.

Other than that. I fear that people will always have the same vices, learning nothing from History. Did we learn anything from the civil war in this country? Did the peoples of former Yugoslavia learn anything from the devastating war they suffered? I really doubt it. Nevertheless, I do believe History should teach us that Greece is not a closed border – it should be an exporter of universal consciousness and civilization. To achieve this, we must reclaim our language. Because in the last five or six decades, every single one in the long succession of Education ministers in this country, thought wise to implement his or her own “innovation”, his or her own educational system, helping create a monster with ten heads and ten arses defecating on Greece. This is not education. If we do not change course, we have no future.

– Could art be a cell of resistance?

– Of course it could. Art resists the ugliness of everyday life, it holds out against stupidity, bureaucracy, superficial human relationships. Art resists everything fake. It also resists the destitution of Greek language.

– Should art have borders? Modern architecture, for example, as exemplified by Le Corbusier, claims there should be no borders, that a building in India should be the same as one constructed in France or Timbuktu. What do you think?

– Le Corbusier’s buildings in India were a failure, exactly because he did not take into account the local environment and tradition. It is the same with painting. I believe artists everywhere encapsulate the spirit of their ancestors. Haiti did influence and enrich the work of Gauguin, but he always remained a French painter.

– Should art dispel, preserve or create its own myths?

– Dispelling is a form of preservation.

– The three palimpsests you present at the Biennale focus on History and your inspiration was the Derveni papyrus. What was it about the papyrus that entranced you?

-I feel I have a special bond with the Derveni papyrus. Someone, 2,500 years ago, unwittingly created a work of art using fire, as I have done in my own work.

– The other major element in the three works is the Mediterranean. Which, paradoxically perhaps, is represented in one of them by Frida Kahlo, a genuinely Mexican artist. Kahlo fought throughout her life to preserve her Mexican identity, wearing traditional Mexican clothes and using Mexican symbols in her paintings. Why did you make that choice?

– First, Kahlo’s father was a German Jew of Hungarian descent. A quarter of her blood was Spanish, another quarter Indian. She had a multicultural DNA. When I look at Frida, I see her as the epitome of Mediterranean women. In my work, she represents a solitary, self-contained and independent marrage to reality. The bridesmaids are not an assorted crowd. It is no accident that Messi is Argentinian. Frida’s bridesmaids are the spearheads of potentiality. There is Marco Polo, who sets off from the Mediterranean to reach the other end of the world. What is the Mediterranean if not a cradle of civilizations? Democritus was the father of atomic theory.

– In your work, Frida gets up from her wheelchair and leaves.

– She stands up and starts walking – we are witnessing a miracle. Because the Mediterranean is the land of miracles. It embodies the notion of Resurrection. I picked Frida exactly because she is a transcendental individual, who always pushed the limits of herself. Obviously, I could have picked a number of other artists as well, like Modigliani or Pollock or van Gogh. It would make no difference. I just happened to pick Frida.

– What about Hadrian?

– When you enter the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, you see on your left two statues, which are thought to be of Roman emperors. The one that attracted my attention is thought to be a statue of Hadrian.

Hadrian was a great innovator in the arts and letters. He oversaw the construction of many major works in Greece – his reputation is blemished by his campaign against the uprising of the Jews in Palestine, that led to the death of thousands Jews.

My work presents Hadrian amidst broken dishes, a material I have been using for years, since my very first solo exhibition. For me, the broken dishes are a bright wave. The umbrellas are collectors of cosmic energy. Therefore man is both the creator and a creation of the universe, a part of the universe, who also encapsulates the universe. People are luminous bodies, and the universe exists only because humans exist in it.

– In your third work, there are also broken dishes, scorched books and sheets of iron, invoking human masks.

– These are references to the metal objects discovered in the excavation alongside the papyrus. This work is the bridge connecting the two others with the Derveni papyrus.

– The way I see it, all three palimpsest find completion in History, and are a tribute to History and humans, from the unknown writer of the papyrus to the foot- ballers who are the new heroes of our time. And in their midst, there are heroes like Athanasios Diakos and Aris Velouchiotis, men of arts like Guggenheim, people fighting against the slave trade, and monks. Almost the entire spectrum of human activity is represented.

And all this is set in the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean as a cradle of civilization.