« The black line »

Inspiration for this series of works came from two paintings in my solo exhibition “Faces” at the Byzantine & Christian Museum of Athens in 2012, which depicted officers and were placed in the main hall as guardian angels.

Along the way this nascent theme began to appear in more abstract forms, acquiring metaphysical elements as well as a ‘religious’ aspect thanks to the transcendental feeling exuded by the works with their light, the featureless figures they depicted (fleeting figures, immobile, dominant; at once subdued and unbridled) and the landscapes around them...

Following the same logic, I went on to paint men and women in typically oriental attire. Even Iwas surprised to discover a subtle relation between this series and the one before it; a relation revolving around duty, religion, the “sursum corda”, the hereafter... What interested me most, however, was faith as an element at once spiritual and revolutionary; I was interested in introspection, seclusion, the inner communication with the universe, with the unknown; in Man who, feeling betrayed and at an impasse, tries to communicate with God as a last resort. The earthy has assumed the form of the sublime, and matter is almost disembodied in a vacillation between perishable and permanent, ephemeral and eternal.

Dominating this silent, transcendental rallying are the angels, unclear and indefinite like shadows before vague, metaphysical landscapes like those in Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks and La Gioconda. Angels/self-portraits of the artist, whose only certainty is that of debt and awe as he treads the narrow path of his mission, at once fallen and risen; he, too, is commanded from above.

Ioannis Lassithiotakis  September  2013

Exhibitions' duration: from Friday, October 18 until Saturday, November 30, 2013. έως  Σάββατο 30 Νοέμβρη.