Review by Harry Savvopoulos

Despite the promises and aspirations for objectivity, modern art and today are distinguished by a deep subjectivity that enables them to be articulated in a space rooted in the experience of the individual and at the same time that of culture. In this context, especially today, in the postmodern era, the experience plays a significant role in the creative process, moving vital threads of the artist’s personality.

The consequence of his excessive analysis by the critical thinking in the field of visual arts is natural, but the obsession with the one-sided dimension of the subjectivity of the experience is paraphrasing.

The cause may lie in its flat significant charge by painters and theorists since the experience easily becomes the gilded wrapper of cheap constructions.

The truth is that the experience is the space where all the empirical contents exist not as shoots but as roots, in a primary form, which makes them generally possible, a fact that strengthens the mood for considering it as something extremely personal and therefore subjective. At the same time, its empirical texture warns us of two things. First, for the immediacy of the participation that is both physical and then for the element of time that is inevitably combined with the fact of the experience. We therefore conclude that the experience is part of the space in which the experience of communication with culture, the definitions of nature with the weight of history and culture, the bearer of history, is transferred through the immediacy of crystallized meanings.

In the critique and theory of modern art, the analysis of experience appears as a radical questioning of the objective truth that will come from the Logos about man (eschatology) and the truth of the Logos determined starting from the truth of the object (positivism).

This process is launched towards the end of the modern era from both documentary and abstract painting trends to prevail almost completely in the whole perception of the postmodern, with several differences so far in the use and function of the term.

Historically in our century the experience has been employed in complex artistic systems with a strong element of mysticism and personal vision or even worldview (eg M. Chagall, K. Malevitch). At the same time, the dominant presence of the personal element in the experience was reflected in the corresponding tendencies of the artistic system.

After the modern era, however, despite the serious conspiracy theories, we have more and more often the lonely creator who shapes his visual language and message without giving manifesto extensions. Art is now an “affair” of an individual because there are no new or “living” values that make up the units in trends or movements. Only in very rough lines can we talk about movements and tendencies, without of course conceptual criteria but mainly morphological. That is why style is what nowadays expresses in a way the spirit that prevails in art.

It is very natural for today’s artists to place special emphasis on the experience, since our time has absolutely nothing to suggest.

Frequent travels to the immediate or distant past instead of to the future in the past decades -the unfolding of the cultural and historical texture of time, lead to values that are brought to the present through the prism of the experience that interprets or re-interprets it.

In Greece, the image in the work of many artists of the younger generation is the result of similar movements in time. Greek art as a whole – without deviating from the general feature of Greek reality – emphasizes the experience, but in a very different way from today.

The experience, moreover, has been one of the factors of stabilization and cohesion of the cultural hot spots that characterize (and historically) our society.

In the visual space, the movement in the past through the prism of experience means a multiple and parallel movement in time that is directed by the present and is directed to the now.

So wandering in the labyrinths of the experienced past, does not dictate a specific visual language. It is perhaps one of the messages sent by our time. At the same time, however, it acquires the perfection of technical training, to such an extent that the artistic process reaches the dimensions of the “ritual”. The visual language is not always determined by the conceptual dimension of the work, while on the contrary it is in a dialectical relationship with the semantics of the work. In short, the newer artistic perceptions, now purely focused on the lived experience, move very often and beyond the limits of direct, personal experience in the wider cultural space: the collective experience experienced by purely cultural structures.

Dimitris Xonoglou has been in this field for several years, almost from the beginning of his tenure in art. In the mid-1970s, during his stay in Italy, he met movements with the modern ones, but retaining paintings and conceptual elements of the Greek space in his work, which he sees from a point of view, at least visually related to the newly formed movements.

The morphology of the image becomes for the artist the argument of analysis and exploration of transcendental spaces, lived experiences that are expressed as personal testimony of a specific subject for example.

Xonoglou is moved, at the moment, by the transcendental element, which often identifies it with the empirical, giving it more or less a strange dimension.

The myth, the legend, the characters, the symbols, are real and alive in the exact same way that in the magic of the game the participant impersonates the evil Indian, the thief or the policeman for the few moments that the game lasts. With the ease that the toddler moves between reality and fantasy in the game. Xonoglou equally easily handles the two spaces of experience and transcendence and most importantly he has a paradoxical belief that transcendence at the moment of the artistic process becomes a reality, becomes an experience of the present or the past. A past that without difficulty comes to the now, vast, that has to do not only with the personal experience, but mainly through it, with the collective. The one that is collectively experienced in the reservoirs of culture in the form of the event in one of the fields that compose.

In many cases in the work of the artist, especially in recent years, we have instead of forms or symbols from the distant past, events, situations, symbols of today’s reality, also given through their exaggeration and transcendence.

In short, Xonoglou either selects symbols from time immemorial that are rendered distanced from their content, or situations are identified with each other, or other times they are compared in a paradoxical way. The same paradox, with the mixture of popular and religious beliefs that compose the religious tradition of the non-urban space.

The eschatological references he makes in the modern world are in essence a challenge to their objective truth, since the human element coincides – it is often identified with the divine. That uncle, experienced in the artist, as a metaphysics of the existence of a truth or a law. Next we would say, the postmodern era that tries to nurture and finally reject, from within, the essence, the meaning and the image of the modern. The image through the exaggeration and violence of expression, the essence and the meaning through the transcendence and the paradox. On the other hand, both eschatology and the positivism of the spirit are characteristics of the subject’s positions and not a process of rejection or elaboration of new ones.

The visual troupe of D. Xonoglou in recent years acquires its stage cover. The artist more and more often makes efforts to set up his work in three dimensions, but the space factor does not change its conceptual orientation. On the contrary, it becomes a new element both in the morphology of the image and in the symbolism of its existence now, within the work of art.

Even in the artist’s two-dimensional endeavors, there is space, either as a violent gesture – tearing the tarpaulin or paper by hand, or as elaborate action (precise cuts). His recent work, you lose the monumental and solid dimensions of previous years, while at the same time its symbolic power intensifies. It turns into an allegory of experienced situations, which now lose their personal element and gain universality. They address the collective experience of the viewer, through generality, but they maintain as images if not to the same degree their clarity.

The way the artist handles the image, the conceptual areas where he moves, give rise to a net of representations and questions that converges on a question. This question is not formulated by him, but it is the viewer who spells it, addressing himself, and it is in fact the question that has been running through the minds for centuries.

Today’s time is called, in turn, to answer through its components the same question: What is man?

The modern age, equipped with the thought of KANT, which indicated the separation of the empirical from the transcendental, has already expressed its view.

Postmodern art goes back to the past where the two concepts were secretly intertwined in a body, wanting to define and define the individual at the same time.

D. Xonoglou, is placed in the question with the whole of his work, which, although it negotiates the transcendence of the personal and the collective experience, but through tangible, direct events of the daily life of the paradoxical becoming of man shortly before 2,000 AD.

Thessaloniki, September 1987

X. Savvopoulos