Dimitris Xonoglou – by Angela Tamvaki

Category : 1983, Reviews

It is well known that both expressionism and surrealism are experiencing a new boom nowadays with renewed forms and symbols enriched with new content. These two trends are not incompatible. Their combination leads to unprecedented solutions and gives great freedom to the artist, helping him to effectively express visions inward and foreign to the realm of consciousness and common sense.

Dimitris Xonoglou chose a dynamic and purely personal alloy of these two styles to give way to his acute and intense concerns. The starting point and focus of his searches is of course man. But what interests him most is not the expressionist depiction of the tragedy of the human condition, but the contemplative contemplation of the social role, relationships and beliefs of man.

His compositions do not lack humor that reaches the limits of sarcasm. Impressive are the freedom and boldness of the color scale, the richness of the symbols that can be interpreted more than one depending on the content of the composition, and the originality of the conception and the performance of the subject. A mystical-religious mood is more clearly seen in his latest works and especially in the portraits of the saints, which are rendered according to the dictates and chromatology of the staff of the expressionist idiom, but also sometimes surprise the viewer with the strictly sacred figures and the well-known Byzantine iconographers incorporated into compositions of a purely contemporary character.

A typical series of works depicts male or female figures holding or having an enlarged telephone handset next to them, without excluding the presence of a second or other symbols. The whiteness of the faces and bodies with the play of light and shadows in tones of red, pink and blue create color intensities that culminate in the contrast of the intense red, blue and yellow of the background as well as the other elements of the image. Is this a humorous note or a nightmarish reference to our oppression by the symbols of modern technical civilization, to the loss of genuine human communication but also to our precious time? But is it just a game and a finding related to everyday reality? Or does the shape and placement of the phone give it the texture and dimensions of a slightly different symbol? A related circle also includes the figures who hold or have in their mouth various key symbols, which sometimes take on supernatural dimensions, covering also their face. The few confrontations between humans and animals are also interesting. Color and design distortions, magnifications and abbreviations, flares and omissions, and escalation of color intensities are utilized in the most appropriate way, highlight the necessary and conceal the unnecessary, enriching the whole with great expressiveness.

Xonoglou’s latest work is dominated by the strong expressionist portraits and the two great triptychs, with the characteristic forms and the richness of the symbols, which are the expression of a key reflection around contemporary but eternal situations. References to the oppressive power of power, to the rape of death and destruction in a climate of diffuse eroticism and framed by red and purple and blue clouds summarize the meaning of the first, which has the eloquent title “Tribute to sweet power”. The second is dominated by the theme of struggle as well as that of the reversal of the role of the two sexes (submission of the male – domination of the female), in the same evocative context of colored clouds.

This time, however, the unexpected presence of St. John the Baptist in a central position with the scroll in his hand and the blue female figure – personification of the river – surprises.

With the exuberant imagination and the explosive dynamism of his painting, Dimitris Xonoglou is undoubtedly a promising artistic presence in our country.

Angela Tamvaki

curator of the National Gallery