{"id":1782,"date":"2016-09-25T12:21:12","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T09:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xonoglou.gr\/en\/ixni-poreias\/"},"modified":"2022-05-28T13:31:51","modified_gmt":"2022-05-28T10:31:51","slug":"traces-of-a-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xonoglou.gr\/en\/traces-of-a-march\/","title":{"rendered":"Traces of a march"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The painter is concerned – or at least should be concerned – just as much as the sculptor, the subject of space.<\/p>\n

Henry Moore<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ikaditore est tradutorre traditore est tradi:<\/p>\n

Anxiety about the ineffable, the risk of not being able to convey it, the sacrilege of conveying it, the menacing spectre of betrayal. Traitors all, we who believe that in our own discourse we can make clear the discourse of the visual arts. We are doomed to the menace of treachery, to the security of a desire to be ‘objective’, and to the deluding certainty of our subjectivity. Yet we are doomed, too, to make the undertaking, with or without security, with or without insecurity.<\/p>\n

Xonoglou was born as the first half of the twentieth century was coming to an end, in the village of Proti near Serres in Macedonia. He made his way to Athens – as he had to do, and as so many other Greeks did at that time. Then it was the turn of the ‘eternal city’, where he encountered painting and pottery. He felt, and came to know, the flame of creativity; Achile Bonito Oliva and the trans-avant garde in Italy. The New Savages in Germany. Later he learned about the life born out of the flames – and not just because he had seen his house reduced to ash and charred remains.<\/p>\n

It takes plenty of courage and the faith to dedicate yourself to a vision in order to set out from the northern provinces of Greece for the labyrinth of Athens and then for Fellini’s populous and beloved city. Xonoglou seems to have had those qualifications – together with an explosive ego. Everything came out in his first works, in colours which set fire to dreamlike images and inscribed the most unexpected compositions: blends of the alluring hell of Bosch, of the fairytale innocence of Chagal, of the aggressive passion of the New Savages and of the deliberate clarity of the neo-representationalists of the trans avant garde. Even now, twenty years later, one can look at these works and see a maturity in their colour and composition which can only be the result of an innate talent struggling to make its appearance and of the manic faith of a young man in his twenties – a man who could do no other than trumpet his faith in his work. The School must have done well in teaching him his letters, and how to cook. It was then that he broke the moulds of pottery and decided to devote himself exclusively to painting. The flame that had given solidity to the ceramic form died – but the fiery colours did not, nor did the flame which, as it burns, creates, or the third dimension which in the meantime had come to haunt his work. Those factors, visible even then, and his own perseverance in searching out the essence and the beginnings of things, protected him from the subsequent Sirens of stripped- down conceptual art.<\/p>\n

This situation continued until the mid-Eighties, when the third dimension established itself properly in his work, not as an illusion but as an object and as matter with displacement. What set Xonoglou off from the other artists working along conceptual lines was, first, that he did not confine himself simply to capturing the concept and rendering it in rudimentary terms, being equally interested in its visual content, and second, that the object and the materials which served the manifestation of the concept had an equal part in its visual rendering. As a result, the burnt books, the Marxist capitals’, the knowledge of tomorrow which makes yesterday’s knowledge useless and thus suitable for consumption as visual material, the words and the Word given up to the fire, the intellectual nutrition that becomes charcoal (and in turn gives the artist the material with which to express his own visual discourse), the candle growing hot and producing energy to sustain the memory (like a burning candle, covering and protecting all the burnt and thus fragile remains of knowledge and the word) – these are the components of Xonoglou’s visual field. Apart from the optic nerve, that field also stimulates the sense organs of smell and touch. The candle which gives off a smell and reminds us of … whatever it reminds us of, the candle which has colour and texture, which takes on a form and becomes a material for painting, the flour, the bread, the charcoal, the burnt paper and the fire: materials for concepts and matter for the visual arts. The first produces inorganic salts: the source of life. The first burns things up, the fire melts the candle, the fire supports the concept, the fire produces the materials of art.<\/p>\n

If this exploratory artist had stopped there, not much would have been achieved. Xonoglou stirs up the fire of his love of colour: there is colour in the candle, in the charcoal, in the burnt things, in the flour. That is not enough for him. Clear ultramarine, vermilion and cadmium yellow, with pure sheets of gold, set off another dance of the colours of fire, surrounding the remains of the real fire. Whatever he does, Xonoglou is a painter to the marrow. For him, concepts ultimately have colours, vibrant and celebratory colours. Before a decade had elapsed since the object and the third dimension began to make their marks on his work, Xonoglou expanded into space and focused on the basic elements of the composition. The circle, the sphere and the point, the triangle and the pyramid, the horizontals and perpendiculars in the rising stairs with their metal floors – all in a fiery purple which surrounds them and contains them from wall to wall. The Point Desert at the Mill in 1992; then the bed with the candelabrum, the steps, the human limbs, the torso, the holes; the rectangular units of brownish-red wood set at right angles to one another, replacing the perpendiculars and horizontals of the burnt books, form the base of the bed – that is, the body of the work – on which and around which the action takes place. Even in this minimum’ environment and composition, there is colour, in the warm brown of the wooden frame around the work, in the ultramarine of the torso, in the waxy paleness of the replica upper limbs, in the off-white light from the candelabrum which takes the place of the candle.<\/p>\n

In 1996 came the time of My Gold Fridge, which represented Thessaloniki at the major exhibition entitled Container 96 in Copenhagen when that city was Cultural Capital of Europe. Each of the port cities from around the world – some 100 of them – was represented by one artist who was to display his work inside a container; the same type of container for each artist. Located all together in Copenhagen harbour, the containers formed a visual city consisting of the houses or workplaces of the artists, interspaced with streets and squares. Xonoglou lined his container with the pages of books which, in turn, were lined with gold leaf. Inside, he installed a refrigerator, where knowledge – art books – was preserved. The Art Book was located in the temple of knowledge, outside the refrigerator, signifying the power and self- sufficiency of art, while the viewer was free to enter what might be either a mausoleum of art or a cage protecting art, functioning simultaneously with the work of art itself and having an effect both on its signification and on its aesthetics.<\/p>\n

In 1997, Xonoglou is preparing Mountain, a mass with a height of 2.40 metres and a length of 6 metres, which he intends to line with gold. This will be the container in reverse: the viewer will not be able to enter the work, and will remain outside it, like the candelabrum – the taper – which sheds its light on the gold ground of the Byzantine tradition of icon-painting. However, as in the previous case he is still part of the work, since his curiosity about the contents of the mass – which is something mysterious, since a precious shell contains and protects it – cannot fail to be present and leads him to walk around it. As Henry Moore said, “Mystery plays an important and useful part in life: ignorance and the thirst to see, surprise and discovery, search and exploration. We are constantly moving back and forth between curiosity and admiration”. So knowledge is a mountain, and art is valuable, precious, because it can build knowledge and protect it while at the same time preserving the mystery.<\/p>\n

This is precisely the point in time at which the craftsmanship of the line, which for years now has been secondary – at least in the artist’s public presentations – being situated behind and below the colour, has begun to call for a voice of its own and is crying out intensely and with fervid wildness. Now Xonoglou has exiled colour – but not space. More than a hundred works have emerged, works which pay reverence to the line and the drawing with explosive thrust and ascetic persistence. The Erotica of self-gratification, the dual-natured Faces – Hourglasses, the Kiss, the Dancers, the Lazy Ones, the Little Murderers, the Cowboys, the Cancerous Story, and a Renaissance Primavera are all drawings of amazing impetus, sincere clarity and a fertile moment in time, which “overthrow the tyranny of the flat surface”. Xonoglou feels so secure in the eloquence of his line that, skilled and passionate colourist that he is, he has set himself to fast from colour. The only suspicion of colour is to be found in the dissolved shellac – which, however, seems to be concerned primarily in consolidating the line and the drawing as a whole – and in a watery azure hesitantly uttering whispers in its fear of being expelled altogether. In these drawings, Xonoglou took pleasure in the visual creation and its traditional tools, demonstrating that he is not afraid of the Sirens of an implanted avant-garde. Against thea addiction of the new, this artist sets the power and sincerity of his elliptical discourse: the line; and he is successful, because he has grit.<\/p>\n

Matoula Skaltsa<\/strong><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of Art History,<\/strong>
\ndepartment of Art History,<\/strong>
\nAristotle University of Thessaloniki<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The painter is concerned – or at least should be concerned – just as much as the sculptor, the subject of space. 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