P.Samios-Painting Apology Part 6

Philippe Dagen “Feux sacrés” In Samios: F.I.A.C. 1986. Paris: Samy Kinge, 1986

[...] It is obviously entirely useless and entirely impossible to understand the subject of Pavlos Samios, since there is nothing here but the art of painting. Art that needs no interpretation, no titles, no captions, no assumptions, no meaning, not even that meaning that we once liked to attribute to those of his paintings in which the mouth of the snake, the woman or the red angel vents flames of fire...

We just need to look at the paintings to perceive that Samios did not have in mind the creation of enigmatic pictures. Indeed, we could imply that he is not even interested in surrealism. That he imagines less than he absorbs or combines. He absorbs the patterns of modernity and the shapes of antiquity. He combines memories of immemorial years with lively details – cigarettes, matches, transistor radios, children’s toys, high heels. All these are easily recognisable, they signify a certain era.

Concurrently however, they are parts of other, more complex, “higherlevel” pictures, experienced through a Christian upbringing, pictures of a tradition of aesthetics in which Samios moves comfortably. The mother and child recall the Virgin Mary and Jesus; but they are viewed again, and differently. The figures of the Ascension suspended in mid-air, candelabras, suspended spinning divers, swimmers, commandos: all of these flying figures seem like the descendants of the angels and archangels, the saintly magi of yore, the Byzantines we encounter in church wallpaintings. Their creators, whether anonymous monks or famous masters from Tuscany, had to solve risky artistic problems in order to represent Hell and Heaven, the Ascension, or the Pentecost.

They had to depict persuasively supernatural phenomena, highlighting the miracle but without offending common sensitivities...

All this however, has been lost in the modern way of looking at things. Progress of the rational spirit or diminution of our visual and theoretical range? It’s debatable. Art driven by poor spirits into the realm of logic has failed. The results it yielded are doubtful. The fact that a painter who is confident in and proud of his education and culture quietly returns to composition and the “world of suspension”, inspired by principles and 552

axioms of the past, need not surprise or anger us. It was inevitable, necessary, essential. Even if some old habits may take offence. [...] With Samios, painting becalms, balances. Colours converse around the blue, the yellow, the pink of flesh. An eye has its points of reference, its lighthouses; the painter has his ways that allow him to risk grander and more complicated compositions and variations. The ideas are crystal-clear, memory is bountiful, history is appropriate.

The work of Samios is projected with power and confidence, without provoking scandal, but also without avoiding it.

Dora Iliopoulou-Rogan

Takis Theodoropoulos

Women Friends

For one night…

In Samios 96: The Women Friends: Encaustic Painting on Leather, Thessaloniki: Anny

In Samios: For One Night… Alimos: Fine Arts Kapopoulos Gallery, 2005

Balta, 1996

The manifestations of the “two women friends”, as Samios has not only seen them but also experienced them deeply, exude a charismatically mystic “atmosphere”. Each of these compositions constitutes an irrefutable argument for a psychographic approach of animate and inanimate alike. Transcending all conventional limitations, Samios succeeds here in transubstantiating the multidimensional challenge he set for himself: colour and the “warmth” of the image-bearing surface (i.e., leather), are used to project, over a common denominator, the human figures and “any” object surrounding, accompanying and irrevocably and decisively defining them.

Inanimate by definition and animate come together in a metaphysical and at the same time physical coexistence. Samios’s achievement constitutes a verification of the authentic and effective creativity that defines this unique and multivocal artist.

Friendship, in a general or specific context, is used as the creative, visual and spiritual pretext: conciliation with the familiar or familiarisation with the unknown; transubstantiation of the notional/spiritual into the physical/organic and vice versa; identification of the immaculate with the “ever-impure”. At all events, the ingenious parallelism of insubstantial and material, spiritual and sensual is an enduring visual, and, mainly, intellectual experience.

So what is it that these women, confined, are waiting for? Their faces conceal more than they reveal by their expression. Their half-naked bodies seem available, as if made for waiting. Around them this dance of miscellaneous objects of everyday use, which seem to have lost their gravity, seem to be hovering in the fluidity of the space, which abolishes distances and distorts perspectives.

Is it the space of the dream, the Freudian territory of the unconscious?

Are the pumps not pumps? Is the handbag not a handbag? Have the objects been proclaimed fetishes? Perhaps some expert in the rules of the grammar and syntax of psychoanalysis could explain precisely why that 20-euro note is where it is or what complex put the cigarette packet in precisely that place?

Does the fascination of the picture extend no further than the symbolic dynamics of the people, the objects, the space itself? The truth is that things would be very simple if it were only so.

Because it is at this point that what’s really interesting about the work of Pavlos Samios begins: at precisely the point where the symbolic dynamic of the unconscious meets with another, the symbolic dynamic of this art which is called painting, which has its own rules of grammar and syntax, which has its own ways of transforming people and things, of distorting space in a way entirely its own.

The erotic glance always serves as a distorting mirror, dilating, shrinking, rambling, condensing, following its own narrative tenses. Even when it can’t find its expression. In lovemaking, the voice is at a loss for words, becoming a whisper, a moan, a sigh. The gaze cannot discern features and proportions. The gaze identifies points of tension; it becomes riveted, trapped.

And painting comes along and captures this gaze at the moment when its world traps it, when the bodies sacrifice their proportions on the altar of a tension, which finds its shape and form on the surface of the canvas. The women’s bodies are outlined through the distorting mirror of a gaze which touches the surfaces to confess its inwardness, 553

like that door, standing ajar at the end of the room, from which a little light enters. And that’s their beauty.

As for the miracle (because there is no creation without some kind of miracle), that is now visible to the naked eye: time is identified with space, in the space of the bodies which remain confined, together with their oneiric grammar, a closed time, a time made only of the present belongs to them. These characters have neither a past nor a future. They are made only of the present. The miracle is present time.

Someone else could go back, to the early 1970s or even before that, to find this woman’s handbag, these pumps, the atmosphere of the brothel. He could talk about the anxiousness of the first time, about the shyness involved, about the mechanically repeated movements. At one time Neorealism tried to dramatise all this. It produced some works which may have evoked emotion, but they always seemed to be talking about something else, they were always looking elsewhere, as if to hide their embarrassment in the face of these closed spaces, of the absolute presentness of time, the availability of the body, the mechanical movements.

In a way, everything in there is clear, and when you set out to explain it, you begin to sully it with hypotheses which are alien to it. Our ancient ancestors may have been right to have taken brothels to be temples and women to be the priestesses of Aphrodite. And it is this sacredness which the eye of the painter is trying to locate. Painting does not explain, does not interpret – in defiance of conceptual tedium. Painting seizes on moments of the gaze in order to underscore their significance. And that is its sacredness.

Because in the end, what remains of the work of Pavlos Samios, over and above the feeling of these women’s bodies, of this space which appears on the cusp of inwardness, of this time which remains confined in the present, what remains is the certainty of a robust painting that reveals its forms with the simplicity of a gaze immersing itself in a dream world.

554

Sania Papa The fiery painting of Pavlos Samios In Samios. Paris: Samy Kinge, 1986

“The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.”

The Revelation of Saint John the Divine 8:7

“A fire determines an arsonist almost as inevitably as an arsonist lights a fire.”

Gaston Bachelard La psychanalyse du feu

Samios unintentionally burns his paintings. His pictorial “prehistory”, firmly attached to the standards of the Athens School of Fine Arts, remained pending; awaiting its effacement, its purification. The experience of fire (a fire completely destroyed his studio and all his paintings up until then) translates itself into his work obsessively. “Salutary” fire illuminates his imagination. In effect, the artist confers to the dream of fire a primordial importance: “It shines in Heaven, it burns in hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and Apocalypse,” in the words of Gaston Bachelard; and it can become painting.

Samios attempts a dive into the history of styles and forms; an encounter among civilisations; an exchange of meanings. He confronts and initiates a dialogue between the “various stories”, the images, the pictorial traditions, the archetypes, the mythical symbols which preserve “open” cultures (Byzantine Art, Photis Kontoglou, Cycladic idols, the art of the 20th century, Oscar Shlemmer, Otto Dix, Modigliani).

Samios’s painting is at once representational and non-representational, naturalist and abstract. Certain permanent pictorial elements that belong to Byzantine painting appear distorted, but not as the nostalgic survival of a certain tradition.

Their particular characteristics: The constant schematisation of the human body: the face, flat like a mask; the narrow, ovoid head; the long nape; the deliberate disproportion between the anatomical members; the flat forms; the almost total rejection of “Alebrti’s”

perspective in favour of reverse perspective; superposing and apposing pure and clear colours; the frontality and juxtaposition of characters; the solidity of the drawing; the rigid articulation of the hard volumes; the arrangement of the composition in successive zones; the obsessive repetition of the same motif (hand, table, cigarette, smoke, woman...).

Samios distorts realism and diverges from it. He shatters immediate reality and the restrictive limits of the frame. Each canvas becomes almost “a frameless delirium” that extends to infinity, reminiscent of a religious wall painting. One composition might overflow into another or divide itself into several.

The image of the body, which is also the centre of the representation, repeats itself in “pious and profane” postures: a slippery body, deprived of thickness, dematerialised, stretched by a simplifying distortion (ovoid shape), a fascinating stereotype, (a combination of the human form and geometric elements), a puppet or a doll-idol, androgynous (sexually ambiguous), anti-natural in its elliptical registration.

The characters – fainted, sleeping, entwined, chained in a vicious itinerary (the fall) or nuptial desire – collapse under the blow of a spectacle of comedy and irony. The circumstances are staged: in a banal, everyday context, the characters smoke and speak with “tongues of fire”. They evoke certain mythical, biblical, apocalyptic heroes; the initiates go down to the bottom of the abyss to confront the monsters.

Samios paints evil canvases, profane spaces, mystical places. He paints the “modest blur”, fundamental archetypes: the serpent, the dragon, fire, the hand, woman.

An extraordinary fusion takes place between the serpent-ophis-dracos the beast shaped, the seducer and the woman. He wraps himself around her body. The figure of the devil surrounded by the damned who proceed to excite little devils is one of the most fantastic, the ultimate creations of Byzantine art. Fire, at once celestial and chthonic, an instrument of the Devil, is magically engendered in the genitals of witches. Smoking and devouring, he transforms himself at the same time into a vital breath, a pneuma-spirit.

She displays personal and universal symbolic beliefs, obscured by historical pressure. “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace…”

Takis Theodoropoulos Materials from the inner world In Samios in London: Paintings. London: Gallery K, 2002

A cigarette packet – one of those flat ones you can’t get any more – lying next to a pair of red women’s pumps (a stereotypical erotic fetish), a halfopen matchbox, a letter as yet undelivered, a pair of glasses, a half-empty bottle of wine, a drinking glass... And all these things scattered on the table whose sides do not form right angles. That is because it too, in turn, is suspended in a universe made of sea water or, simply, the darkness of the night. In the background, next to a misty crescent-moon, stretches the glow of the lighthouse, like some kind of threat made of light, of the same light which comes through the windows of the house with its tiled roof as it hovers, seeming to have lost its gravity to the same light as that emitted by the neon of the fish.

Or rather not. The latter is something else. Electric pink attempts to dominate with all the power of its eloquent symbolism over the surface of the canvas. The subject of Pavlos Samios’s painting is, first of all, this surface.

What are its materials? To answer that question, you only need to look a little further down at the other surface, the one of the adjacent painting, showing the woman with the fire breathing dragon. The embrace, fatal but erotic, carries the anointing of innocence and of the dream, like the closed eyes of the woman who has surrendered to sleep. The various symbolisms, some obvious and some hidden, invite you to decipher them: a piece of mythology, a phrase from Christianity, the ichthys – all in all a Greek seascape.

But to return to the picture of the table which, from painting to painting, seems like an obsession, it is clear that a “symbolist reading” doesn’t quite work. There’s something missing from such an approach which seems to be the most essential part. Is it the insignificance of the objects that’s to blame? Is it the way in which the space has been arranged? What is certain is that these objects mark out their own space more than they symbolise a universe which exists outside them.

555

It’s as if you’re dealing with one of those makeshift museums that archaeologists set up next to their excavations in order to organise a first classification of their finds. In these, the corners are not at right angles, because the objects which they are called upon to describe or to protect are pending on the borderline between the certainty of their existence and the uncertainty of our knowledge. They have come out of the earth, but the silence which envelops them, the doubt about their future – no one yet knows whether they will go into the showcases or the storerooms of the great museum – still wraps them in the inwardness of the space within.

The subject of Pavlos Samios’s painting is precisely this state of suspense, this point in time on the cusp of the moment when the shape emerges from inside itself, to leave its imprint on reality. Each object, even the most insignificant one, becomes in this way the fragment, the shell of a Protean inner world, a shadow which has emerged into the light and has caught fire.

I am neither a historian nor an art critic. I’m a man who loves painting and would not trade for anything the elation I feel when I come face to face with it; when, that is to say, I stand in front of a work which convinces me that what I see out there, with my own eyes, is the material of an inner world which has touched the light and my senses without being consumed by fire, without losing anything of its ambiguity, its enigmatic life, the reason for its existence.

I know, then, that when I say that Pavlos Samios translates using the materials of his painting that borderline suspension of his between the inner and the outer world, it’s as if I’m saying that he does what painting has been doing since the first painter was born on this earth. However, this too is important: today, it requires great imagination and even greater daring to be conservative. After the fascinating but arrogant explosion of the past century, now that we have become convinced that art can only be art – otherwise it has no raison d’être – it is important when one sees someone attempting to reconstruct the terms of the game while assimilating the experience of defeat.

Today, having seen where the flattening out of everything by artistic and cultural 556

events has led us, it is crucial to come face to face with the power of the work, with the power of this inwardness. “Art culture” produces events; painting produces works, commonly referred to as evidence of inwardness. If we have any reason to go on producing art, it is because after the scourge of psychoanalysis, after the arrogance of symbolisms which we created in order to interpret our existence, this inwardness continues to concern us.

I have left for last the idiosyncrasy of this inner space which Samios brings to light, the character of the seascape, so green that it looks almost black, which seems to have escaped from the tunic of some Pantocrator; as if somewhere, in its penumbra, a gaze is lying in wait for you, ready to grab you just when you think you have brought it to heel.

And I have left this for last not because it is the least important issue, but because it is the most easily misunderstood.

In the age of the First World Culture in history, trying to entrench the terms of one’s imagination is like trying to set boundaries to stop radioactivity from leaking out after an accident at a nuclear power station. In other words, anyone doing that runs the risk of being seen as outlandish.

But however outlandish the reproduction of the terms of “Greekness” may be, the adventure of its persistence is equally interesting and fruitful.

The point is not to create stage sets which might fill us with tenderness or nostalgia, except that, deep down, we feel that they have nothing to do with us. The point is for us to be able to see our sacred space, there where even the most insignificant detail conquers its vital meaning at the moment when it comes into the light, like the rainbow behind that window, which may open onto the inner or the outer landscape – you just don’t know.

These fragments, these shells of the obsolete world, which is our world, mark the archaeology of a life which is our life. And that is the power of Pavlos Samios’s painting.

Haris Kabouridis Archetypal images In Samios in New York: Paintings. New Υork: Foundation for Hellenic Culture - Consulate General of Greece, 2002

archetypal images

Women embracing the mythical dragon, a land fruitful with ancient poetic stories and allegorical shadows in Plato’s cave.

DEMANDING SITUATIONS

To what extent can these archetypal myths, painted by an artist originating in the oldest metropolis of art, speak today in New York, the modern-day world capital of Western culture? For those who tread an earth like that of Greece, the history and myths of centuries are a living reality, not only in museums, at archaeological sites or in Byzantine churches, but also in the countryside. There is always an anxiety about how far Greece’s contribution to today’s universal vision is recognised.

Can New York’s art loving public recognise in Pavlos Samios’s painting not only the roots of the ancient myths but also the sources of the art of painting itself as those have evolved through the centuries and as they are evolving now, bringing together the maniera Latina and the maniera Greca?

In August 2001, these paintings of Pavlos Samios were already finished. A few days later, on 11 September, things became extremely difficult for New York, for the rest of the world, and for art itself. The images of the Twin Towers collapsing went beyond any precedent in the history of iconography. Like a vast flash with a range extending through time, fearful images of destruction were imprinted on our eyes, entered deep within us, functioned like apotropaic religious iconography, called rationalism into question, brought to the surface individual forms of panic, sought to re-determine where each of us belongs.

The works of Samios – a painter with a timeless gaze and an experienced hand – were produced at the prospect of this major New York exhibition and include everything which the artist feels he can say

through his work to the art lovers of the metropolis – a large part of whom are of Greek descent – as a painter and as an intellectual hailing from a great cultural tradition.

We face his subjects: the figure of a young woman in the embrace of a dragon – a large snake spewing flames from its mouth – with real or mythical objects all around, a bed, a car, fragments of ancient sculpture (the Sphinx, Pegasus) which emerge from the earth, a megalopolis with skyscrapers in the background. In another group, we see the interior of a room, its doors and windows open and a table in the middle, while human shadows and miscellaneous objects give the feeling of a supernatural upheaval.

And yet the visual apprehension of the viewer is shaped not only by these recognisable forms but also by their hidden syntax: the brush­strokes of paint which are reminiscent of frescoes, the postures which make the figures statuesque, and the strange perspective of the space.

WATCHING THE TRAJECTORY OF A BIRD

The gaze of the viewer seems to descend from a flight through the air of the room, to almost touch the table standing in the middle and to then rush out through the open doors to encounter a lighthouse, on the headland, at the far end of the landscape. This trajectory is standard in most of the works. And it leaves behind the feeling that it is palindromic, that it returns to its starting-point after a pendulum-like movement.

The table in the middle looks as if it has been drawn by a Byzantine painter, so that it can be seen in perspective from every corner of the room. On it are familiar objects – wine bottles, glasses full or empty, cigarette packets and matchboxes, cutlery, a book, reading glasses, etc.

– but also other things, whose existence comes as a surprise, such as cut branches, little flames of candles which emerge from the wood of the table, and shadows of human heads or hands which are probably a little further back in the room. On the floor lie red women’s pumps or shapes of neon lighting, reminiscent of a night club, rounding off all the things encountered by the eye as it traverses the picture diagonally.

Another group of works is dominated by the Woman-Dragon Group and everything occurs in an open space. Sometimes, the protagonist seems to be expressing feelings of pleasure at the embrace; at other 557

times it seems to be a suffocating relationship.

What allegories are being conveyed here? An encounter in the stereotype of Beauty and the Beast – which has its roots in the Pan-Nymph Group – speaking of the hidden female desire for a dynamic male instinct, as perhaps semioticians would interpret it?

Or perhaps, conversely, a primordial fear that the vision of the female form will be swallowed up, like that of the seer in the Laocoön Group? Her eroticism is ambiguous, but also diffuse. With the form of the ancient mythical Sphinx always appearing alongside her, the heroine of these sibylline narratives is elevated to a Pythian figure. She speaks to us from within her Dionysian trance.

Half-hidden masts and ship’s sails in the background, a crescent moon above the towers of New York or the lighthouse glowing far off on the horizon – in the pictures which take place indoors – make the whole atmosphere enigmatic, allegorical.

In one painting, two men are engaged in a sword fight against a background of two skyscrapers. In these works as well as in those of another group, the situations which the painter dramatises seem enigmatic but also calm. The world of dreams with its own coordinates. The figures and objects depicted from one work to the next live in a time of their own and in a special fantasy zone. As if in a world without gravity, in a time which has stopped at the most characteristic moment in the life of the figures in each canvas. The moment is monumentalised, sanctified. And the painting is transformed into an image of sacred personal memory.

PALIMPSEST ICONS

Samios represents the pacific painting which was established in the last decades of the 20th century, at a time when national and cultural borders were becoming increasingly indistinct. With a brilliant career in terms of exhibitions in France, from the outset he had a vision which was symbolist and metaphysical, though at the same time grounded in aesthetic reality. He also had distinctive, almost unique, experiences in the use of many diverse painting techniques – fresco, tempera, oil-painting – dur558

ing different periods. Recently he was elected professor of icon painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

In his talk at the symposium on ecclesiastical iconography held on the island of Patmos, Samios spoke of his vision of a notional church, which would open onto natural space – poetic and not traditional-formalistic. A little later, in the company of Euphrosyne Doxiadis, we talked about how the Fayum portraits became the basis for Byzantine painting, extending Late Hellenistic painting and the Platonic theory of representation, and about how it was Byzantium which thus saved Ancient Greek painting and passed it on to Western Europe in the time of Giotto. At the same symposium, we heard from Alekos Levidis about how the Platonic perceptions of colour lived on in the Late Byzantine period, together, of course, with theories on the role of representation, that is to say, of painting itself.

Samios is not only one of the most important and acclaimed painters of his generation he is also an active thinker on the enduring fate of art and his homeland. When I saw again the polyprismatic Byzantine perspective of the table in the centre of the room, I forgot everything I knew about Cézanne and rationalised perspective space, and I had a sense of the sources of everything – Theotokopoulos and his roots. It’s a well-known fact that Cézanne visited a major El Greco exhibition in the years when he was exploring polyprismatic pictorial space.

Seeing once again the Woman-Dragon Group and the Ancient Greek symbolism all around, I recalled that metaphysical painting was born in Athens in 1905, by Giorgio De Chirico, then a young man, who reflected on the ‘halted time’ of funerary reliefs. Samios’s paintings contain feelings which in this land have taken root many times over the centuries. Their subject matter is classical and solid, based on a well-digested pictorial vocabulary and showing great ease in drawing and the use of different techniques. His figures have the monumentality and timelessness of Late Roman and Byzantine fresco-painting. They are a reminder of the shift that took place during that period too, from the ancient analytical gaze to the established and familiar, to the mythology of modern times.

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-KNOWLEDGE

The current age of the ‘coalition of cultures’ is something we have lived through before, on other occasions, on our great shared sea of Roman

and Byzantine times, when the surrounding civilisations formed Braudel’s Mediterranean. Now we wish to be taught how the rest of mankind views our contemporary art, just as in the past we learnt of our international self from our two Nobel prize-winning poets, George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis.

In an era of globalization, has our art certain distinctive characteristics when it meets the gaze of art lovers from another country? Is it familiar, as that of other eminent contemporary painters showing their work at the major metropolitan centres of art? Conversely, is it like the art produced at artists’ studios of our times, or like something growing on the roof of a very old building, its roots drawing energy from the ancient Greek foundations and the Byzantine tiles? Does it give expression to those who see it in regard to themselves, as they live in the embrace of their own culture, or does it express traditional philhellenism, nostalgia for the beginnings of Western European civilisation? Do Samios’s human figures, with their typical sculptured style, convey the message to their viewers that they come from the tradition of the fresco? That the brushstrokes and the colours declare that they are like those which eight centuries ago – when Venice became the other Byzantium – taught Cimabue and Giotto all that which had been preserved and evolved from ancient Greek painting?

For me, in any event, these works by Pavlos Samios philosophise on his cultural coordinates; coordinates which are individual, artistic, inspired, yet at the same time collective, particularly at a time when all of us are seeking messages of transcendence and optimism.

Haris Kabouridis Daily life as a religious icon In Samios: Esotera: Frescoes. Thessaloniki: Zita Mi - Metamorphosis, 1998

“Gifted with exceptional talent, Pavlos Samios is well-known for his distinctive figures, staged in everyday situations – portraits, couples, still lifes – somewhere between realism and surrealism. Some time ago, we had seen another intriguing series of works that were made by encaustic painting on leather and focused on his personal memories of his shoemaker father in a confessional tone. He’s now back to painting frescoes. Their subject matter is classical and solid, based on a well-digested pictorial vocabulary and showing great ease in drawing and the use of different techniques. His figures have the monumentality and timelessness of Late Roman and Byzantine fresco-painting. They are a reminder of the shift that took place during that period too, from the ancient analytical gaze to the established and ‘familiar’.”

One might be able to sum up in a few words the underlying principle of Samios’s painting in a newspaper art review like the above, which I wrote for Ta Nea, yet the deeper feeling exuded by his work takes a lot more to be expressed. Samios’s oneiric world has its own coordinates. The figures and objects of daily life that are illustrated from one work to the next live in their own time and in a special fantasy zone. As if in a world without gravity, in a time that’s paused at the most characteristic moment in the lives of the people in each painting.

We assume that these are recollections, imprinted on his memory in the form of snapshots which, like noble obsessions, hover around his imagination, reclaiming their place in each painting, now in this corner, now in the other. But these are not sad memories; their nostalgia is a sweet pleasure and joy, not regret that these moments have gone.

Samios approaches these recollections in a glorifying manner, revelling in them and turning them into a monument. A room, a table and anything that may be placed on it – dishes, fruit, cigarettes, drinks – they all seem necessary in order to characterise the action of the human 559

heroes in each story, which we can easily recreate. A personal moment has taken place in the home: a person’s dream or an amorous encounter. Time has stayed still at that particular moment and the painter conveys it to us with sanctity.

Samios paints with the humility of a craftsman of old, putting at the service of these nostalgic images many non-traditional painting tools, without drawing attention to their erudition. He is experienced and knowledgeable when it comes to Cézanne’s analysis of form, for example, or Picasso’s blue period, yet these ‘insider’ dialogues with his fellow artists are just nostalgic memories, like his themes, showing love and no desire to compete or surpass. What’s important to this painter is to convey his own image and the emotional charge that concerns him – not to seek out innovation.

For the same reason, he almost hides out of modesty his particularly gifted drawing and synthesising ability, as he sets the stage for the action in his works: perspective with multiple reference points, multidimensional space, as if seen from many angles and many emotional interpretations, people and objects as if in a spaceship where there is no gravity, as if in a dream. The moment is monumentalised; sanctified. And the canvas is turned into an icon of sacred personal recollection.

Samios enjoys the little moments of everyday life and asks us to do the same. This is what the viewers of his works feel and they experience this particular tenderness of his paintings. Lately, an older technique of painting has captivated the artist and has enriched even further his means of expression – that of fresco painting. An ancient method, used for centuries to paint temples and palaces – places of sanctity and formality – which has almost been forgotten nowadays. Samios revives this method and uses it to advantage. Frescoes require an experienced hand, as colours are quickly absorbed by the substratum and the brushstrokes have to be confident, as should the general outline of each composition. In order to practice fresco painting, an artist must either draw stereotypical religious icons in churches or themes which are much loved and nostalgic, i.e., worthy of being re-encountered, from nostos, meaning return in Homer. From this viewpoint, therefore, the artist paints our tender daily life as a religious icon, turning it into a timeless monument.

560

Haris Kabouridis A dreamlike revelation inside and out In Samios 2000. Athens: Selini, 2000

When the painter’s multi-prismatic studio bursts out through its windows to the outside world to narrate archetypal legends.

PART ONE: IN WHICH THE VIEWER’S GAZE RIDES ON A BIRD’S TRAJECTORY AND, RUSHING FORWARD, ENCOUNTERS PRECARIOUS SITUATIONS

It’s as if the viewer’s gaze is descending from a flight through the air of the room, to almost touch the table standing in the middle and to then rush out through the open doors to encounter a lighthouse, on the headland, at the far end of the landscape. This trajectory is standard in most of the works. And it leaves one with the feeling that it is palindromic, i.e., that it returns to its starting-point after swinging like a pendulum fixed on the ceiling of this peculiar room where the paintings take place.

Everything our gaze falls upon is clearly depicted. The table in the middle looks as if it has been drawn by a Byzantine painter, so that it can be seen in perspective from every corner of the room. On it are ordinary, familiar objects – wine bottles, glasses full or empty, cigarette packets and matchboxes, cutlery, a book, reading glasses, etc. – but also other things, whose existence comes as a surprise, such as cut branches, little flames of candles which emerge from the wood of the table, and shadows of human heads or hands which are probably a little further back in the room. Finally, on the floor lie women’s pumps or shapes of neon lighting, reminiscent of a night club, rounding off all the things encountered by the eye as it traverses the canvas.

That is clearly a precarious situation. What could be going on?

PART TWO: WHEN PRECARIOUS SITUATIONS BECOME UNCONTROLLABLE

The situation in the room that Samios describes is very disturbed. It’s as if all of the objects got up and sat back down anywhere, driven by a mysterious force. Could it have been a powerful earthquake that shook the table, along with everything that had been placed on it, and knocked to the ground the pink neon tube, which makes the wood emit flames and the shadows of the human figures to betray such concern and agitation, almost terror?

At this thought, the room becomes claustrophobic and the gaze searches for a way out towards the opening of the door, where it receives

its answer: No, it wasn’t an earthquake, since the tall lighthouse at the end of the headland hasn’t collapsed and continues to shed its light, allowing us to look upon the calm sea. With the exception of one or two paintings where we see signs of a fire, the outside world doesn’t seem to be facing any big problem. And so we come back to the room, feeling even more curious.

We pay more attention to the details and attempt to give another explanation: If it’s not a natural phenomenon, could it be a mental one?

Then we see that a human head and hand are growing out of the table, whereas in another painting we see the side of the table bending where a stick leans against it. We see the shadow of a woman’s head meeting a real necklace left on the table and it looks as if it’s actually wearing it.

We also observe two other shadows – a man and a woman in the same painting, naked – who seem to possess odd traits: she has a head which is burning (without being destroyed) and he has what look like small horns on his head.

“Nymph and Pan” we hastily conclude. An amorous encounter with an archetypal meaning; mythological, timeless. Therefore, all the surrounding disorder is nothing more than an intense, personal, probably sexual encounter between a man and a woman. Tension and eroticism.

But no. The atmosphere as a whole may contain symbols of daily familiarity and revelry, but it also reveals a metaphysical state, beyond experienced limits. The shadows generate riddles, allusions, a dialogue between the shown and the hidden. It’s as if they’re produced not by a familiar source of light, but by another, unexplored one. The situations depicted and animated by the artist seem to have become uncontrollable…

PART THREE: THE PAINTER KIND OF SHOWS HIS HAND

…though not unfathomable, for when it comes to art, riddles and allusions are its very essence, just like the essence of a scientific text lies in the rational juxtaposition of its demonstrative arguments.

So what is the artist doing here?

Is he relating the consequences of a natural disaster which has already taken place or which he fears is imminent?

Is he relating an intense amorous encounter which makes him see the

world in pieces which might be reassembled later on?

Or is he relating intimate fears, nightmares and obsessions which have come to light from the depths of his soul and disturb the natural aspect of reality?

It’s a confusing situation, forcing us to look beyond the room, out into the open, where the scene appears much calmer. And what about that lighthouse, standing at the ends of the earth? Why does it shine as if in an illustration from a children’s book by Jules Vern? Why does it remind us of folk religious engravings? Why does it look to me like the setting sun in Dürer’s “Melencolia”? A sense of metaphysical revelation is suggested through all this. Revelation?

PART FOUR: A PARABLE RISING FROM THE DEEP DREAM OF ART

The descriptiveness of the pictures presented by the painter can only be a mask, I think to myself, as I jump once again onto the trajectory of the gaze which I described in the first part, going back and forth on that imaginary pendulum. The narration of the situations to which I was led by what I see in these paintings has certain secret parts. The painter has set traps so that we can pass by them clandestinely. The dramaturgy of the situations described lies elsewhere. But where?

Why in the notion of “A window to the world”, of course! In the notion of the opening created by the door and thus, indirectly, in what they used to say during the Renaissance: that a painting is like a window in a wall that opens onto another world. The viewer becomes an Alice in Wonderland, even if in these paintings of Samios, the adventurous oddities lie on this side of things, not on the other.

These paintings tell us about painting itself: that painting is a door or a window which leads to dreams; to all that is kept at the depths of our psyche. A Platonic approach then? The shadows of the carved wooden deities that represent people and situations, but which remain transient and temporary unless reduced to archetypes, to the Idea?

At this point I feel as if the painted beam of the lighthouse is pointed at my own secret thoughts.

I remember the guided tour of the Monastery at Patmos I was given by the artist a few 561

months ago, where he explained the significance of the church’s iconography. It was during a break in a symposium we were both attending. Samios was describing a notional church, which would open onto natural space; a poetic church rather than a traditional-formalistic one. A little later, together with Euphrosyne Doxiadis, we talked about how Byzantium evolved Ancient Greek painting and passed it on to Western Europe in the time of Giotto.

Alekos Levidis then spoke about how the Platonic perceptions of colour lived on in the Late Byzantine period, together, of course, with theories on the role of representation, that is to say, of painting itself.

Being thus reminded of the fact that Samios is not only one of the most important painters of his generation, but also a successful icon painter, I turned my gaze back to the paintings of this new project. And when I saw once again the multi-prismatic, Byzantine perspective of the table in the middle of the room, I forgot everything I had thought about years ago regarding Cézanne and rationalized perspective space, and I felt the light of this stereotypically painted lighthouse becoming brighter, shedding even more light not only on the paintings but also on my own inner world.

Then I looked closer at the colours of the paintings, particularly at the harmony of the tones, the muted contrast. The allusive shadows in the paintings may not have disappeared altogether, but they were coordinated by a more revelatory light. It applied both to me as a viewer and to Samios as the creative elaborator and revealer of the images of each painting.

Now his paintings didn’t seem to be narrating stories of merely personal interest or of what goes on in an artist’s studio but rather a parable closely connected to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The paintings were about how the soul of the painter plumbs its own depths, having reached the age of maturity and recognition; about how he seeks enthusiasm (from the Ancient Greek entheos, meaning divinely inspired), how he seeks permission to create a representation and a symbol of the world.

In these paintings, Samios depicts the philosophy of art. Simultaneously, he states his own cultural coordinates, historical and timeless, which concern us all.

562

Dimitris Kraniotis Self-contained stories January 1991. Posted on the wall of the Zoumboulakis Art Gallery

The Zoumboulakis Art Gallery in Kolonaki announces the opening on March 14 of an exhibition featuring Pavlos Samios’s most recent work, under the title Self-contained Stories.

Large-scale paintings in oils and wax, like scaffoldings that reveal light’s feast and tell its story.

Indistinct stories, slices, fragments, miracles giving shape to the unseen like a wordplay stammering the ineffable, repeating it, thwarting it… now… then… it comes it goes, a game, a detail, an encounter, a borderline in the wind of memory, suspended… to pause at fractions of light and chasms filled with warmth, intensity, daring. Just like love, playing the mystery of life and things, as time rolls its transient die into the deep waters of silence and is disturbed like a maelstrom in the inexhaustible source of meaning…

Self-contained stories written by the cunning light of the imagination…

Marina Lambraki-Plaka A native precursor of Modernism In Samios in New York: Paintings. New Υork: Foundation for Hellenic Culture - Consulate General of Greece, 2002

Pavlos Samios belongs to a species of artist that is on the verge of extinction. These are the history painters, as Leon Battista Alberti called those who serve an anthropocentric type of painting which, for many centuries, held first place in the hierarchy of genres. Myth and history provided an inexhaustible mine of subjects for the painters of tradition. Realism and the Modern Art movements inflicted successive blows to history painting, without, however, being able to eliminate it.

There has been no lack of “storytellers” in 20th century art. And we shall find them not only among surrealist painters. One of the greatest myth-makers of the past century was Pablo Picasso, the most daring proponent of the avant-garde. Iconoclast and icon-worshipper at the same time and antinomically, depending upon his affective fluctuations and historical circumstances, Picasso moulded his personal mythology from the rubble of traditional repertoire.

Pavlos Samios draws his own narrative material from everyday life, which is often transformed into everyday madness. Narration, of course, does not mean the mere depiction of a scene of the type of Cézanne’s “The Card Players”. Narration means action, dialogue, drama, sparring, interaction and transaction, love, and the exchange of gestures and glances. Narration also presupposes a stage set occupied by the appropriate apparatus and signs. The signs play a special role in Samios’s narrative codes. I’m thinking of those unruly red pumps, which are practically living and breathing and which are rudely dropped onto the floor in some corner of the painting, proclaiming the tempestuous entry of the female, turning the canvas into a field of erotic battle, either in the present or in the past.

Surrealism and particularly the postmodern condition have opened up new horizons and offered multiple alibis for the transcendence of logic in narration. To these latest works by Samios, besides the familiar figures and signs, subjects known to us from other works of art have migrated, such as Dali’s girl at the window, the classicist woman in thought by Picasso,

Pegasus known to us from a painting also by Picasso, and the severed arm of the statue of the dead warrior with the broken sword from Guernica.

Often the scene is overrun by shadows, forming enigmatic or legible actions, like that erotic couple in which the man with the horns of a satyr sets fire to the head of a woman, enveloping her shadowy face in real flames. A picture with ordinary objects may also be occupied by neon sculptures, while out at sea, illuminated by the glow of a distant lighthouse, a house floats with its windows ablaze, exchanging roles with a ship that’s been placed on the table.

In a recent series of paintings, a mythical beast, a dragon with the head of a horse breathing fire from its mouth, engages in erotic effusions with a woman given over in ecstasy to its crushing embrace. The series culminates in the sexual encounter of the dragon and the woman on the bonnet of a car. Winged horses, sphinxes and other mythical monsters attend as silent witnesses to these surrealistic erotic scenes.

But it’s time to speak of the plastic codes which undertake to render perceptible the complex narratives of Pavlos Samios. The artist was fortunate enough to have fine teachers, both living and departed. Nikos Nikolaou and Yiannis Moralis initiated him into the language of good painting. The teachers of the Generation of the ’30s had paved the way to a new understanding of Greek tradition in the light of Modern Art. Pavlos Samios did not vacillate, did not ally himself with the gainsayers. Besides, the generation of the ’70s, the generation of the military dictatorship, encouraged by the trend of photorealism, returned without inhibitions to representational painting, thus creating the Greek version of critical realism which directed criticism at the regime.

It was then that Samios shaped his plastic codes. Resorting to reverse perspective, to the elimination of the planes and to a multifocal system of visualisation which combined the teachings of Cézanne and Cubism with the inventions of Byzantine painters, the artist created a space which does not violate the painted surface. His forms, roughly sketched, displace their vital space with their mass. They are vaguely reminiscent of figures by Balthus, Kontoglou or Engonopoulos, without ceasing to be absolutely identified with Samios’s own personal morphoplastic idiom. The colours retain the memory of their 563

origins in wall-painting. There is a light application of grey to them, as in a faded painting which allows the canvas to show through. In his latest works, the gold and purple flames of a fire or a distant lighthouse warm the cold dominant tones. In several of his most recent paintings, the artist settles for monochrome. It is perhaps there that the virtues of the drawing and the bold simplification of the form are shown to advantage.

Pavlos Samios heralded the postmodern iconographic conventions which we saw developed much later in works by painters such as the Italians Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia and the French artist Gérard Garouste. The difference is that Samios’s own ‘postmodernism’ is personal and made of indigenous raw materials.

564

Yorgos Maniotis A short story prompted by a painting by Pavlos Samios In Samios: For One Night… Alimos: Fine Arts Kapopoulos Gallery, 2005

My way of life for years now has been moulding my body. The head remains straight, adolescent as always, clean-cut, honest, innocent, melancholic. My chest, my hands, my neck remain the same as always.

They appear to have belonged to one person for a lifetime. But love seems to have come to an end in the bright shadow of the empty room.

Habit has brought on a dead calm. Nevertheless, a current of freedom blows in from the doors and open windows. But no one dares. In front of me on the wooden floor my myriad shoes are spread out. White pumps, probably from my wedding. Decorated black pumps from some Carnival nights. Everyday pumps suitable for work and strolls along brightly lit shop windows. Much-worn shoes like deserted nests thrown on the floor. Among them, a pair of red patent leather pumps await their journey into the night. But no one dares. Nobody so easily gives up what they’ve grown used to, however much a breeze of freedom full of promise may keep insistently blowing. Sorrow and tension are what this breeze brings into the empty room with its sparse furniture. How can you open your wings to the world if the only thing you’ve learnt to do is to offer pleasure and consolation to your chosen saviour? Your deprivation unites your hearts and lives. Your deprivation, which is somewhat helped by a love from the first moment you met, makes one unique for the existence of the other. You’ve learnt not to see another living soul in the world, and he has been forced by fear to look only at you and nothing else. As time goes by, first love and oaths of eternal fidelity have become, little by little, pure agony. There was still a little blood left. But with time, this agony began, regrettably, to become a habit. Drought, dead calm and tension which were unleashed on the furniture and changed its shape without destroying it. But the body, in spite of everything, remains alive, filled with desires, dreams and fantasies, seeking its share. But no one dares put on the red shoes of freedom for a night out on the town. All these things come at a harsh price. They upset the order of the world. They cause cracks in the ways of humanity. They remind people of things that they want to forget. Who gives up what

they know, what helps them to get by, for an unknown which merely promises? On this borderline, deep depression ensnares you in its web.

If you don’t act blindly, soon all that’ll be left of you will be a dry shell on the silk threads of the black spider. But the body reacts without asking you, from the waist down it begins to overflow; growing little by little, it becomes gigantic and you have trouble coping with it. The scale has already tipped towards what you imagine to be freedom. As a first step, you tear off your clothes and sit stark naked on the table. On the upper part of your body you’re wearing an unbuttoned shirt and on your bare belly you rest the grey shoes of daily life, because you’re still calling the shots. Next moment, you’ve spread your legs, you’ve put on underwear and are offering yourself without moving. In the silence of the room nothing moves, only a sadness flows like a grievance from your impenetrable profile.

You’re exhausted by a battle, it soothes your nerves; it brings a salutary sleep on the uncomfortable table. Shortly, everything turns grey and your soul leaves your body. The table becomes invisible. And you stay suspended in the middle of the room, a shadow like a folded cloud without your favourite objects all around keeping you company. Neither your pearls, lying there next to you on the rough wood, nor your earrings, which look like pills, nor the glass of cold water, nor your silk scarf in the half-open drawer. When you wake up, the colours have returned and your heavy desolation is, as always, at hand. You came and went until you made up your mind. Then you get up, feeling numb, put on the red shoes and look for the old leather suitcase. The time has come for you to leave your prison and to go out into the courtyard of the world. Hunted, you emerge; you leave blindly. An odour of life draws you to that which everyone since long ago has called a great sin. You can no longer bear to be looted within these four walls and you go out to steal a little of the coolness of the forest. You don’t take much with you. Only the red handbag that matches your shoes, your little red transistor radio with its antenna, your red cigarettes, a box of matches, and some letters with which to send your messages. You take refuge in cheap hotels somewhere in the provinces or in districts next to ports. Bare rooms with wooden floors, mirrors propped up on the

floor and tables like icon-stands. On there you spread out your wares and your melancholia. Cigarettes, half-eaten chocolates, ashtrays with half-extinguished butts, a half-empty bottle of red wine, a glass, the red bag with your make-up. Little things, beloved objects, essential to your loneliness. Like an old time singer, hounded, not knowing how to cope with those dead hours of the early afternoon. In front of you, a halfnaked man catnaps on the floor without sharing one whit of your anxiety. As always, he has taken what he wanted and has left you alone to manage for yourself. You derive strength from his indifference and you move on. You leave him lying at your feet like a useless shadow which has surrendered once and for all to its non-existence. No, you didn’t kill him; he’s been long dead. Such stories take place at all hours of the day. Persons unknown who rob you of your affection and your love.

Little by little the money runs out. Sitting at the table almost naked, you look down at the last banknote on the floor. You step on it in case the wind blows it away, only now you’re wearing your black pumps. Your red pumps you’ve left next to you so they can rest, all scuffed and scratched.

This sleepwalking of freedom must stop because reality, as always, is knocking at your door. You can’t go back. There’s nothing left standing for you to go back to. Without further ado you must bow to fate and cut your losses. What at first you gave as charity to sentimentalists you must now learn to sell. Your face, up to this point, throughout this whole ordeal, has remained intact. But now that cash has come into play, it has begun to grow tired and old. It’s filled with sharp edges and vulgarity. It has gradually become a mask. You’ve lost the luxury of choice. As if that ever mattered. The company you keep now is women who do the same job as you and are similarly weighed down. A friend of yours from the past who met you by chance has tried to drag you back to your old haunts. Her efforts have produced no result; the glass containing the wine of your old friendship has broken and spilt its contents on the floor. In the background of the painting you can be seen, sad-faced, sitting alone, as always, at your little table. Your decision to hold out to the end indicates that you’re the winner. Meanwhile, your friend from the past is trying to save you, but you, with things as they are now, 565

cannot see the usefulness of such a salvation. Yet your friend won’t stop whispering to you, she’s trying to keep you among us. “These games of freedom,” she says, “aren’t meant to be played fairly. When it comes to the crunch, there’s the crack of hypocrisy. There’s no need for all this to be done in the open. People, in order to survive, have their secret times, their ‘mysteries’ as they called them in the old days. You can fool everyone, since they’re so inhuman and don’t understand. It’s a great victory to live in their paper stage-set, without serving the body. There’s no need to take their advice seriously. They’ve been fooled. They’ve been made to embrace the impossible and the unattainable. But you, who wish to remain alive and whole, you shouldn’t lose your life, you shouldn’t become an example to be avoided in your efforts!” But you’re so tired, so desperate that you can’t hear a word anymore. One way or another, they’ve killed your love and you don’t care…

566

Olga Mentzafou-Polyzou Stories, big or small In Samios: 30 years of painting. Patras: Patras Municipal Gallery, 1999

When studying Pavlos Samios’ work and tracing back his career in art, which has been ongoing for over twenty years, one cannot help but notice the successive stages in a constant re-evaluation of his iconographic peripety and his points of reference. As one of the artists who have gone against the trend of new abstraction and juxtaposing the gesture or the idea with the depicted object, thus raising the question of depiction once again, Pavlos Samios does not hesitate to propound his faith in painting on canvas, which continues to offer the chance to revise the relation between reality and art, drawing elements and methods from the past of painting. His constant encounters with master painters, with leading figures in avant-garde painting or with older, classical painters as well as with Greece’s painting tradition of the antique and Byzantine eras, pose again, in the context of his work, the problem of our relation to the past, not in the form of pointless nostalgia, but rather as belief in and awareness of the fact that an artist is both the recipient and the communicator of his cultural heritage. This acceptance leads to a readdressing of questions which Modernism has neglected, such as the importance of the subject, the new role of the form of the narrative, the recreation of the setting of a story by searching for references in the history of art. And indeed, one sees that Pavlos Samios’s painting, from the mid-70s when it first appeared to the present day, is nothing more than a field for carrying out a stichomythia in front of the viewer, as both the real or the imaginary experience takes on substance; and dreams, life and love become reality.

In Paris in the mid-70s, the teeming streets with their modern lighting, the busy shops, and life in luxurious places were all stimuli that would lead the artist to create his own personal story. Naked or half-dressed women; lonely, immersed in their dreams or, when there are more people involved, in a silent dialogue; women standing at the

edge of a door; sitting in front of a window or on the corner of a bed; on expensive chairs in wealthy homes; squeezing into crowded cafés, enjoying life and love. Girls weighed down by memories of classical antiquity, from funerary steles to the “Bridal Songs” painted by his teacher Yiannis Moralis; self-sufficient figures, satisfied by their physical nature, like the ones painted by Nikos Nikolaou, also Samios’s teacher. The sexual element and the stimulus it creates are suggested by these bodies so full of sensuality, forcefully occupying space; a space strictly organised in a geometrical arrangement of surfaces which obeys the laws of rhythm, order and harmony.

And then suddenly, around the mid-80s, everything changed. The strict structure with its geometrical planes gave its place to a daring move which the artist dynamically conceived, assimilated, and put in order without weakening it. Heavy bodies, full of expressive power, revolve in a space which can no longer adequately contain such momentum and passion. Views of different projections, which seem to reveal multiple aspects of the same figure, constitute a new approach to narration, as the human figures with their standardized appearances, without hair, use only the movement of their body to tell their tale. A tale suffocating within the painting’s tight frame and becoming, sometimes, a triptych, each part of which has the dimensions that the artist needs. Other times, this idea of limitlessness is expressed through the fragmentary depiction of body parts or through the contraction of perspective, as in frescoes. Thus, painting which was traditional becomes conceptual and as space fills up with a multitude of elements – dragons, fire, smoke, clouds – it demands the viewer’s active participation in deciphering and tracing it back to the artist’s ideas. Dense, thick outlines; dynamic contrasts between light and dark surfaces fashioned in a way that revives memories of Byzantium; subjects replete with hagiographic references, such as the flame, that symbol of divine revelation, the dragons of the Apocalypse, the very hand of God which guides the movements of human beings – all these attest to the artist’s profound relationship with tradition. Samios’s expression, with its energetic spinning motion within a chaotic space, continued throughout the 1980s and despite the fact that his painting focuses on ordinary,

earthly events such as birth, family, and human interactions, nevertheless the relationship between his characters remains suspended somewhere between the earth and the sky, a relationship which keeps trying to break out of the painting’s tight frame, from that predetermined space which keeps changing through the different perspectives and aspects.

These relationships between people have preoccupied their artist more and more during the present decade. Even though his figures are rendered in a more stylistic form, with unabated boldness in terms of how they are drawn and with disarming refinement in the use of colour, nonetheless, they try, like acrobats, to balance on the tips of their fingers, while maintaining their “loving” relationship. With a steady hand, the artist gives his images rhythm with a line that is at times interrupted by voids which also constitute an organic part, a piece of the composition. The strict, geometrical arrangement, which is now defined not by shape but by colour, and the enhancement of the surrounding outlines contribute to the monumental calmness of the composition.

In the same way that he conveys human relations, Samios expresses this era and those bonds, equally strong and intertwined with the essence of Man, that tie him to nature and his activities in it. Man integrated in creation is experienced in Samios’s work as an indivisible unity with nature, expressing his primitive relationship with the earth and sea. This relationship, of a glorifying nature as the light shines upon a human figure planting a tree or fishing in a rowboat, seeks only to point to the utter harmony that can exist between Man and the natural environment, between Man and the nostalgia for a paradise in danger of being lost.

Human activity linked to the daily struggle for survival and the relationships that inevitably stem from this activity are also celebrated in another series of the artist’s work centering on his experiences in his father’s shoemaker’s shop. The painter, having already acquainted himself with a particular use of surfaces, develops his narrative using pieces of real leather, on which he arranges memories from cherished and beloved scenes and images. The dominant figure is the father, usually commanding the centre; to the side, a woman customer is 567

seated; and then the artist himself, small and insignificant at first, gradually reaching manhood from within a multitude of pairs of shoes, which remain symbols of female elegance and charm, but also of eroticism.

With a profound knowledge of tradition, Samios does not hesitate to use diverse materials, not in order to exhaust his technical expertise, but because their use is part of the cognitive function of the work.

Just as the use of leather refers to his father’s work, so does the use of wall-painting in recent years depict, in a spontaneous, natural way, as the material demands, everyday stories of people, scenes that play out in beloved places, objects charged with memories. The narrative, while steadily piquing the artist’s interest, enriches the composition with a variety of elements, each of which tells its own story. The human figure is always present. Even when it is absent, an item of clothing or a certain activity suggest its presence. And though here too the subject is dominant, the coexistence of all these elements in the spatial unity of the works is still indicative of the peculiar relationship between the artist and the space in which everything must be integrated. Everything that has its own story to tell, big or small.

568

Mary Metaxa-Paxinou About Pavlos’s Women In Samios: For One Night… Alimos: Fine Arts Kapopoulos Gallery, 2005

In a shabby room, I embrace you, however you are. Whether I like you or not. Most of the time, if not all the time, I don’t like you. Which is why I close my eyes. So I can forget about you. And together with you to forget about my life. The same in its loneliness as your own. Otherwise we wouldn’t have met. You pay me to erase your flaw. And I take your money, which I often disdain, to let you believe that you’re the same as me while I lend you my youth, my breasts, my waist and my hips. But what you can’t take from me are my pumps.

They stay there, laying on the floor, exhausted, attesting to the dance of my absence.

Because I, on top of my body for sale, this empty courtyard, doomed to frigidity, I will pretend for you, while at the same time, inside, I’ll practise flying. Far from your squalid rhythms, over there where I won’t feel, I won’t smell, I won’t touch and I won’t hear... Embalmed, I’ll give you an empty carcass to carry out your most intimate commands, to tolerate the moans and the secretions, together with all the sewer of your perversions. To realise your vilest desire, while at the same time I will embrace your shame together with all your loneliness with empty hands which refuse to harken.

And so, as I clean up your entrails, pure and undefiled I will liberate my virgin soul to fly out through the open window smiling at having done its duty and brought to completion yet another mission.

The profane will be transubstantiated into something sacred. I shall be transformed into one saintlier than a saint each day, and holier than the most holy I shall gaze into the distance, with my shirt unbuttoned and through all my dejection, for redemption to come from you. My task is a supreme one and so is my offering. And my sacrifice is angelic. Because this is my way and my choice.

Dried out I will reach extremes, embalming my body to gag my longings, my hopes and my dreams. To bring you relief.

And here is my secret. Reversing life. Turning sorrow into joy. After all, wasn’t I His most beloved?

Olinka Migliaresi Varvitsiotis Traces on time In Samios: Traces on Time. Athens: Benaki Museum, 2007

A brief review of the oeuvre of Pavlos Samios shows indisputably that he belongs to the few experiential painters of the 21st century, boldly and respectfully carrying his artistic vision and the painterly tradition of this land.

A quick look at the 30 acrylic paintings presented is enough for the viewer to see that the distinctive character of this exhibition is due to the fact that it constitutes a synopsis, a personal taking stock of his work by the artist, a recognition, a looking back over a long artistic career which never stopped generating images, symbols, ideas, emotions.

This in turn generates a need, on the part of the painter, for an introspection in which he consciously reinterprets experiences and symbols, renegotiates older themes, and reevaluates his obsessions with those little, recurring, daily moments, which are often the reason and the starting point for a subject and the creation of a work, “but where the painterly implications exceed the subject, and the everyday is rendered descriptive, metaphysical and eternal…”

If we attempted to answer the fundamental question of “What comes first in painting, thought or feeling?” in Pavlos Samios’s case it is obvious that every thematic unit is emotionally charged with the artist’s love of life; his love of little, everyday stories; his love of time whose memory may be summed up in a little, red, beloved transistor radio without batteries on which the painter would try to listen to opera.

The transistor radio, or any other object, such as the pairs of pumps or the handbags which are often contained and repeated in Samios’s paintings, are the symbols of a time, a situation, a feeling. The painter must capture these feelings, this emotional charge, the aura of a situation, and then convey it to the viewer. Samios tries and succeeds in conveying the feel of a story, in activating the sense, broadening it and completing it.

Just like Robert Montherwell’s collages were a kind of journal consisting

of the depictions of objects, so do the objects or even the human figures in Pavlos Samios’s works constitute the starting point for an experiential narrative, which makes creation real. That does not mean that the artist’s thought and imagination are characterised by a relativity similar to that of spacetime.

Often, the interpretation of the paintings is complemented by or dependent upon the mental path of the viewer, who in turn will give the work the “completion” he or she desires.

569

Olinka Migliaresi Varvitsiotis Under the moonlight In Samios: Sto fos tou fengariou. Athens: Eikastikos Kyklos, 2009

Even at a young age, Pavlos Samios knew what he wanted to do in life.

He was certain that he would become a painter. His talent in drawing was affirmed by his father, for whom he designed shoes in their shoemaker’s workshop.

Early on in his career, he became captivated by religious painting and to this day he paints frescoes in churches. He took drawing lessons at Pavlos Sarafianos’s art workshop and was admitted to the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he has been teaching since 2000, at the Traditional Painting Workshop (Fresco - Byzantine icons - Manuscripts).

His teacher at the preparatory course was Nikos Nikolaou, who placed emphasis on drawing and on the tradition of Ancient Greek Art. He was then taught painting by Yiannis Moralis, whose intervention in the contemporary Greek art scene resulted in an exalted position in Greek modern art. In Paris, Pavlos Samios met the painter Yannis Tsarouchis and the composer Manos Hadjidakis and was lucky enough to be included in the group of intellectuals and artists who frequented the “Magemenos Avlos” restaurant. It was a time of extraordinary intellectual collaborations, offering a unique example of the way in which painting explored a dialogue with the other arts, and it had a profound effect on the young artist.

As far as Pavlos Samios is concerned, life is closely linked with love.

“Everything originates from love,” as he has often said. “My painting is daily life seen in a way that is quite metaphysical.”

The exhibition at Eikastikos Kyklos, however, does not aspire to familiarise the visitor with the painter’s well-known works. On the contrary, it presents a series of bold nocturnal compositions which strike a balance between abstract and representational painting. The narrative style of the exhibition titled Under the moonlight focuses on the moment when, while awaiting one’s lover, time seems to stop and the moment becomes eternal.

The paintings are named after specific hours, with an aim to comment on the question of time, on the time spent waiting, on the hours that drag on, on the loneliness of the night. These, combined with the mood fluctuations of the person waiting, the yearning, and the anticipation of the lover’s arrival, are the feelings which make up the ambience of this new project.

570

The canvasses are inundated with enlarged tables that act as a background. “On a table you place ideas, you place an imagination,” says their creator. The various familiar objects the viewer sees in these well-structured compositions create and maintain cohesion with the artist’s past works. The objects step out of their essence and adopt a symbolic nature, telling a story, either real or imaginary.

The interpretation of each painting is the one provided by the person who reads it and not by the one who created it.

The freedom to interpret and put together the story taking place generates the interactive relationship between the viewer and the painting, and their freedom to converse. Samios’s work takes on a narrative lyricism. The technique of the Expressionist brushstroke and the bold colours, the contrast between the cool green, blue and mauve surfaces and the familiar reds and terracottas create tension. The depiction of the night is reminiscent of a dreamlike setting. For the lovers of life and art, this exhibition is a milestone in the oeuvre of the artist Pavlos Samios, because it consolidates his own relation with objects, his experiences, love, and his own language.

Thanasis Moutsopoulos

Thanasis Moutsopoulos

Two entirely different paintings under a starry sky In Samios, Manolis Charos: Two entirely different painting styles under a starry sky.

In the end, she was left alone…: About that woman in Pavlos Samios’s painting

Trikala: Alma Contemporary Art Gallery, 2010

In Samios: In the end, she was left alone… Athens: Expression Gianna Grammatopoulou, 2006

It is true that Pavlos Samios and Manolis Charos, good friends both and established names in the visual arts, come from two entirely different artistic backgrounds. This makes this double exhibition especially interesting for art lovers in Trikala and Thessaly, as they will have the chance to observe two of the defining trends in 20th century painting – which is still very much alive in the new century.

Pavlos Samios presents paintings in which we see amorous (or sort of amorous) couples. He shapes his forms into exaggerated, disproportional bodies. Samios is, historically, one of the very few Greek artists to have embraced Picasso, that figure on the cutting edge of modern art, who has almost become a synonym for it. Elsewhere, the Greek painter produces still lifes (though the term may be misleading, since in most cases a human, usually a woman, is hiding somewhere in the background) with lemons, wine, fish, cigarettes, transistor radios, or, in other instances, watermelons, letters still unsent, a rainbow, a tiny man sleeping on a table.

The geometrically weathered table is one of the leitmotivs, one of the crucial elements of the painter’s work. Pavlos Samios belongs to a European tradition of representational painting, onto which he has grafted memories of Byzantium (this being his other great love and focus of his activities) and of our great post-war painters, such as Tsarouchis or Nikolaou.

Frenhofer, the archetypal painter of Balzac’s novel, struggles desperately to create the (painted) image of the most beautiful woman ever created. This (fictional) painter will sum up but will also presage the vain and tragic nature of the artistic act, as well as the longstanding obsession of (male) painters with the (female) figure, usually nude. In many ways, Pavlos Samios seems to be a Frenhofer of our age. For thirty years he has struggled to paint woman. And this seems to be the most comprehensive outcome of this pursuit.

She is not always present. But even when she is not visible, her presence is clearly implied through uncontestable signs: tables covered in objects, cigarettes, letters, transistor radios, half-finished bottles and glasses of wine, money and – persistently – handbags and, mainly, shoes. Traces of habitation, but also traces of amorous wrestling, a crime that asks to be solved. But yes, the pumps. A memory from his father’s cobbler’s shop, but unavoidably a sexual fetish as well. Under Samios’s direction, the pump, the quintessential female (either in inverted commas or not) shoe, is exhibited as an obsession on the verge of delirium. In this way, the viewer transforms the object into a fetish and develops an addictive bond with it. According to Freud, the fetish is developed around a point of action from which the child sees but denies what it sees and falls into a ritual of denial of the fact that his mother has been “castrated”.

Freud wrote that when the fetish comes alive, a certain process was abruptly interrupted; what was probably the last impression left before the traumatic experience is preserved as a fetish. This is the last moment at which the woman could still be seen as phallic.

In some paintings, the woman appears alone, in others there are two women, in others there is also a man, usually confined to a bed, the victim of intense lovemaking; almost castrated. The women emerge as the winners 571

from this sexual battle. Just like Manet’s Olympia, Samios’s woman has absolute control over men, who desire her and end up exhausted following a night of (faked perhaps on her part?) love and, chances are, much poorer. The atmosphere of a brothel, of love for sale, but also of post-coital depression permeates Pavlos Samios’s painting as it permeates the street where the artist’s studio is located, in a disreputable neighbourhood in downtown Athens. The way in which he paints (these) women seems to condense into an alloy his thirty-year-long painterly peregrinations: Picasso and Modernism, classical representation, the Byzantine elimination of logic. Surprised? Pavlos Samios introduces a preeminently “oriental” approach (Byzantium) to a preeminently Western theme (the portrait, the nude) and successfully blends them together.

The 20th century and the prevalence of the precepts of Modernism in the visual arts brought about a radical re-examination of the way things are perceived, along with contradictions and confusion.

Our interest in Modernism is usually based on the fact that it finally propelled Western art beyond the mere depiction of things. However, the demands of Modernism and the deconstruction of painterly space coexist with the “discovery” and re-evaluation of non-Western, “primitive” and ultimately older artistic forms, with Picasso having played a decisive role in the matter. Samios concentrates some of these demands in the form of perspective distortions and disproportion vis-à-vis the scale of the figures or the objects: the women’s feet and pelvises are unnaturally enlarged (is it a fetishistic obsession or a geometrical game?), while the pumps, the artist’s leitmotiv, steadily acquire gigantic dimensions. This is proportionate to the dimensions the female presence (the female ego?) has in Pavlos Samios’s artistic universe. Given, then, that the demand for realistic representation and perspective depiction no longer applies, the way is paved, after many centuries, for a different reading of older European arts, such as Romanesque and, potentially, Byzantine art.

Yet, does Byzantine art belong to the corpus of Western art? The myth of the continuity of Western art, already present before Modernism, was created based on a series of appropriations of forms which were foreign to it, the most defining example of which is the “re-discovery” of Greco-Roman art by the Renaissance. Regarding this admittedly complex issue, for the past decades Samios has been putting forward certain very convincing topics for debate.

572

Another group of works. A woman who is almost recognizable this time, realistically conveyed, finally vulnerable… In one of the paintings, the presence of the indiscreet artist is revealed through his reflection in the mirror.

Everything is offered up to our gaze. Like indiscreet voyeurs, we encroach and intrude in the private life of one person (or two). The viewer can be a witness to this relationship, but cannot do much more: he is forced to admit that he is merely an intruder. It’s difficult for the viewer to believe that this particular woman is getting undressed just for him. He cannot transform her into a (real) nude. We feel guilty. We are witnesses to moments and scenes that should not have been available to us. But art has always done this. The simplest and most obvious source of enthusiasm for a male voyeur, as Edward Lucie-Smith has written, is a naked woman, and the female nude is a staple subject in European art. That age-old theme of Venus observed.

The history of painting could have been written based on this premise: that the male artist is a voyeur and the model-woman is the object of his voyeurism.

In these paintings, often in terms of the non finito, Pavlos Samios satisfies the indiscreet male viewer of his paintings by unfolding the full arsenal of female sensuality, but without ever undressing his model. At the same time, however, in these paintings, as he did in the previous more triumphant sets of this project, the woman remains the absolute master of the game. To quote Shakespeare: For she is wise, if I can judge of her.

And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true.

And true she is, as she hath proved herself.

And therefore, like herself – wise, fair and true – Shall she be placèd in my constant soul.

Irene Nikolopoulou

Maria Daliani

Paintings rich in light and stories of love

An untitled story inspired by the painting of Pavlos Samios

In Samios 94: Peinture. Athens: Skoufa Gallery, 1994

In Samios: Esotera: Frescoes. Thessaloniki: Ζeta Μi - Metamorphosis Gallery, 1998

The light belongs to the sun of the Mediterranean, the sun of Greece.

It is the light of early afternoon on the beach, of dusk at the ouzeri, of late night on the open-air dance floor.

Pavlos Samios “writes” his love stories for the family that delights in summertime moments.

The artist also paints summertime love.

Fervent but fleeting. It comes along, as torrid as summer itself, and departs with the second August moon.

Samios places his pictures and stories in time. Without meaning to, perhaps? Or is inspiration fuelled by life’s experiences, as in every other art form?

The Sixties. A calm, clean environment. Love is ‘in’. So is family...

Simple materials, austere forms, “classical” toys: the paper plane, the sail boat, the bicycle.

Happy children, with no electronic toys. And happy parents with their transistor radios, with no mobile phones.

And dance? The dance of love, of course. Slow dancing, cheek-tocheek, in the open-air night clubs of that unforgettable decade.

Colours, perfumes, tastes of a certain summer.

The perfumes are worn by Samios’s tall, shapely women. The tastes are of succulent summer fruit and freshly-caught fish.

Ultramarine, pomegranate red, lemon-leaf green, the vitality and luminosity of the central colours together with the dark outlines combine to create an optimistic and joyous palette.

Besides oils, the painter has once again employed the ancient technique of encaustic painting, mixing wax with mastic gum from Chios to make indelible portraits of his luscious figures.

The painter, who returned from Paris and has now settled in Athens and Aegina, evidently believes that “paintings rich in light” and “love stories” can be born only in his native land.

Stories of heartbreak. Especially to do with love. But she is elsewhere now... This does not concern her. Her life is settled and so are her debts to others. But why did she open the drawer? It’s been years since she last remembered him. Nor can she quite recall all the angles of his face.

More than anything, it’s that sensation of erotic sweetness in her body.

That rare sensation you keep buried deep inside and only let sneak back to the surface when all your body parts have been numbed by the absence of emotions.

He left before dawn. She can still remember how tenderly his lips touched her brow. He left her alone in the room and went away. She never saw him again. Summer was over. She went back and so did he, but on another ship. A tattered piece of paper, the only tangible link to the relationship, disappeared at some point, like all those precious things you want to keep close. It’s a mystery.

His own tattered piece of paper made her phone ring and all corners of her soul soften when she heard his voice say her name, two, three, four times in a row. It was as if he was saying “I love you” every time he said her name; as if he could find no other words, he was so overwhelmed to have found her again. But a rose isn’t always a rose. She knew it, and he certainly knew it but preferred to pretend he didn’t.

That night she wanted to walk along the edge of the cliff and just slip off where there was no branch to hold on to. So there would be no time to regret it and, if she did, to not be able to do anything about it. She closed her eyes and darkness came. But not total darkness. A soft light coming through the window made his body look white and thin. Once again she saw her head resting on his chest, his fingers resting on her hair. She didn’t understand what he was saying; he spoke in words and sounds that were unknown.

His kiss was a little bitter, somehow desperate. She’ll never forget it. She took the handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his brow. Next morning, she found the piece of fabric lying next to her face.

When she got home, the table drawer seemed to be the only safe 573

hiding place. The drawer side was always against the wall and the drawer closed. She got up off the floor and shook off the lethargy of nostalgia.

She can’t live her life with ifs and buts. Life is built by actions which, for the most part, we don’t regret. Isn’t that the wager? She left the drawer open and left feeling defeated. As if she had lost a wager...

Daybreak. Soon, the ship will appear. Which means that soon he’ll be gone. Again. It’ll be the second time they part. The first time it was she who had opened the door and walked away without looking back.

Is that what he would do now?

A sweet torpor makes her unsteady on her feet. She feels the need to lean on the balcony railing. But she doesn’t want to sit down; at least not now. She persists in the self-torment of waiting. Any moment now the dark bulk of the ship will materialise on the horizon she knows so well. What was the name of that film? “The long absence”... Is that how she’ll think of him after a few days; a few months? He doesn’t speak and silence is as sharp as a blade of ice. But then again, things may not turn out that way at all.

He might leave now, but what’s to stop them from meeting up again?

What’s to stop them?

Damn it, if only we talked more! If only he said something to break the iceberg. He could say “come over here” or something more practical, like “let’s take a walk down to the harbour until the ship arrives.” But he has withdrawn into himself. Not in the way he did a few hours ago, when he was on the floor. It’s as if he doesn’t want to face the truth.

She feels his despair like electricity up and down her spine. She dares not look at him.

She thinks of the wager again. At least let us regret something we did... And then what? Would it have been better if she hadn’t opened the drawer? If she hadn’t opened the door? If she pretended she didn’t know... What if... what if she were to follow him?

The dark bulk materialised on the horizon she knew so well. She must decide now…

He walks up to her. His gaze is intent. My God, the way he’s staring...

He opens his arms and pulls me in. He starts moving to the rhythm of a tango. A single body with four legs.

No music was needed. Tango is love expressing itself. The flame smouldering inside leads the steps. There’s no way you can feel like this 574

and be mistaken. The body breaks free from any rules and loses its shape. It becomes artificial, it flows like volcanic lava. It ignores gravity. To an onlooker it appears rigid and stiff, like the dance requires. But in reality, lava is transformed into a breeze swirling blithely around the embracing bodies.

It’s her first time dancing the tango, but she feels comfortable.

His face is very close to hers. His eyes, dark and intent, dissect her.

She feels like she can hide nothing from him. He leads her everywhere.

And yet their feet don’t move outside a square meter of the room’s floor. His hands are tightly wrapped round her arms, hurting her. But she concentrates on his eyes and his breath, smelling pleasantly of whiskey and tobacco. Her mouth already has the same taste... As if she’s been with him for years...

The first time she opened her eyes she thought she was living a dream.

She was quick to shut them again and said to herself: “Okay, now you can wake up.” Eyelids moving upward. Upward? Yes, that’s what was wrong.

Upward. Not downward. No, this can’t be happening. Not even in the worst dream of the most earthly creature. His hat is dancing the tango above her red shoes, but they probably don’t know the steps yet and so they fall behind. And yet they do follow! Clumsily but stubbornly. Yes, that’s the word. The most stubborn red shoes she’s ever seen. Strange that she never noticed before. When she took them off her feet to dip her toes into the fountain outside the Zappeion Mansion. They were so stubborn, insisting on following her upon the marble cobblestone street, despite the scuffs and scratches to their heels. But this – this is unbelievable.

Her red shoes dancing in the air next to a hat? His breathing is faster, catching in his throat. The music follows his rhythm as he continues to move inside her. As if the music is coming from within him and not from her old transistor radio. He keeps his eyes shut too. Stubbornly. The tip of the pencil traces an elliptical orbit, carving words on the air molecules.

The ink abandons the spiral paths of her memory and leaves a faint trace on the envelope. A stamp of desire which cannot bear to wait for the letter opener. Her body follows his. Her eyes are shut again. But somewhere close by, a cigarette begins to be wrapped in its own smoke.

His flame burns the skin on her palms. Where his fingers touch her. A match is about to light another flame, but suddenly it changes its mind and withdraws into the shadow of the mandolin. Next day, she wakes up

in the room, alone. The matches are stuck on the ceiling and the hat, exhausted and spent, has squeezed into the narrow space between the cupboard and the wall. Pieces of paper bearing words she didn’t have time to tell him are still hovering above the floor...

I’m sliding. I’m entering him in a thousand ways. I’m trying to keep my feet on the floor because I feel that if I stand on tiptoe I’ll float up into the air. Numbness paralyses my knees but I have no other choice other than to slide even deeper inside him. I’m not looking at his face. I don’t need to. He’s inside me, I don’t need the images. I smell his smell, I feel his depth, he makes me shudder with desire. I know he has his eyes closed and is holding me inside him. I know that his back must be aching. I don’t know what he’s thinking... How can one know what he’s thinking? But then again...

Our desire becomes energy that makes me lift up my arms. The fabric presses against my chest, I feel its folds stretching across my body. Before taking my eyes off him, I saw my shirt opened at the neck by my own hands. I don’t remember how we got there. I think we were sitting on the chair before we ended up on the floor. Let me clarify: on the same chair. I had probably sat on him. It was then that we first found ourselves in this room. Of course, this also happened before. If I were to say it was like a dream, that I didn’t want or mean for it to happen, then that would be a verbal infidelity. I simply had a piece of white paper in front of me and I was writing. There was also an envelope, in the event I decided to mail him the piece of paper which was no longer immaculate or white.

But I was not ready. Not yet anyway.

Maybe it was the heat. That night was very humid and very hot. Like the darkness of Piraeus.

She heard his voice suddenly and the glass fell from her hands. Then, she can’t remember how, they sat on the chair and then, again she can’t remember how, they found themselves on the floor, with their clothes on... And then, something inside her told her to open her eyes...

When darkness came she was long gone.

All she left behind was her fragrance and images. Her alluring presence attracted him like a magnet. Now that she was gone, his senses were empty.

He opens the window and all the stars

rush into his darkness like temporary asteroids with their pale light. As he is lying on the narrow bed, he sees a piece of sky and a piece of sea.

Their edges can’t be made out; they come together like lovers, along indiscernible lines that only they know. He tried to write something but it’s impossible. He can’t take his mind off her. It gives him pleasure to think of her. All the images, the words, the movements, the glances, the lumps in the throat – he’s replaying them slowly, tortuously, repetitively, tyrannically in his mind; and this looks like it’s his only choice. Until he sees her again. He wishes he hadn’t let her go. The gentle breeze was taken from his chest... He thinks about her all the time. How can he take his lips off her eyes? How can he pull away his fingers from her breasts?

A drag on a cigarette, a sigh like a sob that can be heard on the moon...

He tries to get up, to do something, maybe something useful. Yes, he could tidy up this tiny room that became an ocean of love. But his body refuses to consent to rational thought. He sinks back into the sheets, buries his face in the pillow, breathes deeply to inhale the air she was breathing a little while ago... Another night of absence begins...

How long can someone stand in front of a blank page? In how much time can such a distant absence fit? What molecules create the absence of a specific being and not any random one? And why does she now feel the compulsive need to contact him again? To talk to him even if he’ll never know it? Is it so important to be loved? And how can one finally be happy when depending on the “love of a being”, in the words of Edgar Allan Poe? Ultimately, is love the breath that you need in order to exist?

The sound of a little wave breaking on the shore nearby magnifies his absence.

This time she cannot write. Her doubts become a crumpled piece of paper that has now left from inside her... She has no idea...

575

Κlea Souyoultzoglou Drawings of psychological aspects: Female figures under the moonlight In Samios: Drawings of Psychological Aspects. Kifissia: Tsichritzis Visual Arts Foundation, 2010

A return to the drawing, to the archetype, to the point where the first gesture is captured and the painter’s thoughts are imprinted on paper. A return to the poetry of the image which semiotically conveys the artist’s innermost existential quests.

Pavlos Samios deciphers the female universe in a series of drawings that narrate the most intimate moments of female existence. A deeply erotic painter, he observes and attempts to describe the “enigma” which is woman, her world, the complexity of her feelings and roles in a man’s lonely existence.

Women who are strong, giving, and at the same time unknown lovers.

The artist harkens to them, describes them with his familiar, penetrating gaze and then is gone, leaving them to their sacramental encounters against a backdrop of the moon.

The otherworldly female figures of Pavlos Samios move around with incredible familiarity inside a timeless, artfully staged space.

Like short, one-act plays, allusively narrating the artist’s existential obsessions. Enigmatic psychological profiles of female relations at an impasse.

Paintings that refer conceptually to Shirin Nishat’s wonderful video-art installation titled “Women without Men”.

Both artists explore in a masterly way, though via different paths, women’s anguish, thus transubstantiating life itself into art. Because art is exciting only when it reveals the inner image of things. When a painter decides to free his mind and evolve beyond his established style, then and only then is he truly free to express himself and to achieve the “optimum” aesthetic level that justifies his entire artistic career.

576

Painting on paper, without a frame, with the beingness provided by the colour, the artful drawing which imperceptibly traces the outline.

Samios’s poetry is expressed in colour and life intensity. On paper, without a frame, without a title.

The ultimate happiness of living with rainbow hues.

Manos Stefanidis The painter and his model In Himeros or the Revenge of the Moon. Athens: Militos, 2012

A. If poetry must either be seminal or not exist, as Andrew the Apostle (or perhaps the Greek surrealist poet Andreas Embirikos?) asserted, even more so painting cannot help but be erotic, even when its subject is death. You see, the supremacy of the image is based mainly on the absolute pleasure that originates in the gaze; in the sheer happiness of vision.

From his very first paintings, the “Cafés”, to the ones he produces now, Pavlos Samios has consistently depicted lovers, couples, figures in flight – a whole world, in fact, which, through colours and lines that seem about to take wing, seems to be saying: “Look at me, I exist!”

Dragons, phalluses, winged horses and naked girls, fires of passion and obliteration, dreams in which lurk desire and terror: here is the painter’s commedia divina, his teatro magico. But I would say that the paintermodel, male-female, inspiration-desire, and stimulus-response binary is his dominant subject. It is the stimulus to which he returns again and again. As he does now.

The viewer is watching a love story. Bodies drawing near, gestures of recognition, coupling, eros. In a room, by the sea, under the all-seeing moon, in a darkness-accomplice that conceals, that suppresses.

Samios, in the most mature period of his work, chooses an allusive style, describing the setting rather than the protagonists; the objectfetishes of Himeros, the god of sexual desire, rather than Himeros himself; the clothes rather than the bodies. The outcome of this choice are a series of compositions that are structured with such plasticity, that they are almost abstract, since the subject often becomes a pretext and the pretext becomes a subject.

Through his loves, the models that inspired him, the women he desired, the painter also reveals, indirectly, what he loves in painting. Picasso’s neo-classical drawings and repeated renditions of the subject “the

Painter and his Model”; Modigliani’s melancholy, blurry nudes; Chagall’s self-fulfilling dreams; Bacon’s violent embraces; but also Tsarouchis and Moralis, for that particular eroticism that emanates not only from the subject matter, but also from the use of the materials: the stimulating wetness of tempera or the sensuality of ochre for example; the warmth of pastel on Japanese paper.

Samios has long since left behind the pseudo-dilemmas between Modernism and tradition – considering them academic by definition – and applied his personal vision in search of the continuity of ancient and Byzantine painting, of Pompeii and Mt. Athos in modern-day artistic pursuits, in modern-day needs. His profound knowledge of the constructional procedures that comprise the body of tradition – yet another “erotic object” – provides him with a very rich vocabulary with which to say what he has to say. Which is none other than the love-death binary, the two-faced image of Himeros and loss. This is when painting becomes poetry and music, a castle that protects from baseness all that come under its wings. “My sorrow is my castle”, Soren Kierkegaard said. Samios does not see tradition as a museum but as a voluntary need for his work to have a keel. And when I say tradition, I mean the entire “tradition of the new”, i.e., this academy which has been forcibly imposed and which, as Harold Rosenberg emphasized in his book by the same title, “has reduced all other traditions to triviality”.

P.S. Today the art of painting is dying, luxuriously swept away by offset printing. As for me, I’m searching for that yet unseen colour painted on the darkest intrados of the chancel of the Monastery of Agios Nikolaos Anapafsa at Meteora. It was placed there, in dim candlelight, where there is no window, so as to remain invisible. A secret love…

B. In art I like risk and not contentedness. In this ambitious set of paintings, more than anything else Samios risks losing the safety of dexterity, frequently choosing an incomplete form, an unfinished narrative, a non finito. He also takes risks by talking about very personal matters, and in577

deed without relying on decorative enhancements or the effects of handicraft. Between the painter-hunter and the model-quarry there lies a vacuum and a hollow silence. The terror will follow. Colour, form, line – they all operate per se and are not exhausted in the obvious. The journey of the gaze must dive like Orpheus into darkness and palpate the light; pierce the surface to gain the depth of phenomena. Whatever we might say, we don’t take Himeros lightly. Nor, of course, the bodies – signals of loneliness that flash on and off like lighthouses in the abyss. A positive conclusion: Art is whatever resists constant enslavement. Especially now, especially for us...

But what is art? Our inner garment. The alibi for our nakedness. Perhaps also our ultimate chance for a revolution without messianic labels; like a religion without metaphysics but with terror ever-present; like a philosophy embodied in images and words. Art is a lie more valuable than any utilitarian truth and an experience as exclusive as death, which is experienced alone but which also exorcises loneliness. Art is also the process that miraculously transforms addition into multiplication to feed the 5,000 with just two fish. Except that here satiation has nothing to do with plenitude, accumulation or today’s over-abundance of “goods”. Unhappiness lies in wait when the individual cannot become collective, however loudly the sirens of marketing scream out their ads. The art of direct consumption, driven by market strategies and lifestyle logic, is the art that is currently prevailing worldwide and what I call “Coca-Cola art”. Art that goes with everything and seeks “phantasmagoria” instead of communion. Let us not forget that Phantasmagoria is a central concept in the critique of civilisation attempted by Walter Benjamin, adhering to Marx when he talks about the fetishism of commodities, i.e., an illusion and a substitute for a relationship. Regarding this point, Baudelaire claims that art is the reverie that becomes a work, identifying the artist with the hero of the new age and the one who will rid the middle class of its hysteria. Today, there is an excess of the melancholy caused by frustration, with artistic individuality being smothered or ingloriously exhausted in the dominant environment of aesthetic fast food and “entertainment” at any cost. To the complete elimination of existence before the tyranny of the spectacle.

578

Therefore, you can understand how this art I’m talking about can function as a form of resistance to the imminent alienation and uniformity imposed from above. To the happiness of boredom, that is. For our part, we swear by an expression that does not recognize experts, establishments or tyrants, and considers all choices open and legitimate; an expression which is political but not engaged, contemporary but not coercively “modern”, aware of locality but not local. An expression, finally, that intends to exist inside history when history, setting aside marketing fireworks and fireworks experts, begins to do its job. And it’s a long time indeed, since this country saw a miracle.

One last comment: There is no “commercial” and “pioneering” work.

Those who claim there is are lying, both to their public and to themselves. The work is one and indivisible. And it derives from one, albeit composite and multi-focal, need. Only then does love occur. Otherwise, we’re talking about prostitution. If an artist gives in once, he will keep giving in forever.

It’s like saying that someone is a “quality artist” in Athens and a “commercial artist” in Thessaloniki. But art means taking risks; even to risk failure or to risk producing an inferior work. Not to know but to be. Because only then do we really deserve success and the revenge of the moon ends up being a blessing...

P.S. Even if we are not poets, we can pen the best poems by how we live our life. If in difficult times we experience everyday life in a poetic way..

Manos Stefanidis As an antidote to nostalgia: Pavlos Samios In Samios: From Father to Son. Athens: Adam Galleries, 1996

Painting nowadays is an art under persecution. Do not be deceived by the continuous co-conspiratorial discourse about it or the demand for its products; in fact, its older, enviable roles are now played by other dignitaries of the image: photography, cinema, video, the various forms of digital image-production, and the computer screen. Inevitably, painters are also persecuted, their works wheedled out of them by the craftiest among those involved in the applied arts. In that sense, the greatest painter-narrator of our time might well have been the prematurely deceased Hugo Pratt.

In the end, painters are the “troglodytes” of technology. They live confined within memory, trying to survive until the scourge of the electronic image is over, this modern-day Ice-Age. Or so they hope… On the other hand, their work demands more and more devoted and restless receptors and not, of course, stupefied consumers. Painting has always sought through its various forms either consolation or wakefulness. Nowadays it must use the same means to also express disgust. Disgust in the Nietzschean sense. Maybe its images – the last pockets of resistance in an undeclared yet ferocious war – are what will salvage the dignity of the current generation vis-à-vis future ones.

Then again maybe not… Things are at a crucial turning point. Hence the confusion; hence all this talk of a crisis; and, despite the oversupply of artworks, hence the inability to understand or the lack of interest in or – more importantly – the superficial relationship with artistic creation.

Moreover, there is an escalation, because of the situation described above, of the public’s distrust, of the experts’ distrust, of the artists’ distrust.

But painting, like a centenarian great-grandmother, can still keep her grandchildren interested by changing, in a thousand different ways, the ending to the same fairytale. It has already been mentioned: nowadays, painting is under persecution. At one time, it had the privilege of defining the face of God. Today, the possibility of such an epiphany is seriously disputed and the old, tried and true methods are no longer sufficient.

Today, the cards are being dealt anew.

And yet, the antediluvian granny still has weapons, still has aces up her sleeve. But who will use them to best advantage?

Pavlos Samios, uses to best advantage, first of all, his own memory. He resorts to it even when he’s escaping from it. The lived images of a charmed childhood do not serve as an alibi but as an expressive need. They guide him through his present series of paintings.

The painter wishes to tell a story and his wish is sacred.

Samios returns to his past as if pleasurably sinking in quicksand and as if, at the last possible moment, grabbing onto the first image that happens to be passing by. In the end, representation saves.

But first things first.

In the beginning was his father’s shoemaker’s shop, the lived space with its odours and very specific representations, the microcosm of daily life: hammers, paring knives, nails, the leather, its smell, shoe trees, polish, dyes, the male and female customers, bare feet, the outline of a footprint, its size, a furtive glance of human flesh, a fleeting touch, the shoemaker overseeing the proceedings (a little god in this smallest of domains), the long-lost craftsmanship of yore.

In Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin regrets being turned into an “automated” worker performing a single motion whereas he used to be a craftsman and creator: a traditional shoemaker doing his job. His workshop was a small temple of smells, gazes and unrestricted creativity.

The entire narrative-depiction refers to 1960s Greece, that mythical land – still beautiful – looking like it never will again. It is in this “place” that Samios settles his accounts with the past. The painting he creates to appease these memories is tender, dreamlike, and melancholic in the way of Andromache, who “laughed tearfully”.

His encaustic technique encourages him to be direct, instinctive, and warm. Leather is often the most suitable surface to receive his nostalgia. The uneven outline is nailed to wooden boards. The work of art becomes an object. Then, quite naturally, the painted pumps are replaced by real shoes of that time. These are objects that are almost 579

museum worthy; destined for an imaginary museum of desires.

By using the materials of the old shoemaker’s shop, Samios respectfully remembers an ancient art. There’s nothing melodramatic about this. As an antidote to nostalgia, he proposes an esthetic equal. The fetish of the pump has undergone a mutation. It has become a geographical fetish. Samios knows how to handle modern narrative techniques.

His work is contemporary. His well-known and long-established style of painting with its elongated, ethereal figures is significantly renewed here to avoid the risk of stylization.

The solutions he chooses are vindicated.

The imagery balances between the dreamlike and the earthly; desire and its plastic rendition.

The awesome great-grandmother can rest satisfied. And hopeful…

Note On a 4th century BC vase found in Magna Graecia and now exhibited in the New York Metropolitan Museum, there is a depiction of a painter using the encaustic method to adorn the lion’s skin Hercules wears over his shoulder. In the end, certain things have remained so identical despite the passage of time that time itself often resembles an optical illusion.

580

Stavros Mihalarias

Fotis Kremmydas

Samios, Exhibition October 24 - November 23, 2002

Samios, Summer 2007

Stavros Mihalarias Art

Fotis Kremmydas’s house - Kremmydi, Cephalonia

On the occasion of our latest collaboration with Pavlos Samios, Stavros Mihalarias Art is proud to present a major exhibition of the work of this versatile artist at the Contemporary Art Gallery on Alopekis Street.

I have known Pavlos Samios for several decades, but until now we never had the opportunity for a substantial collaboration. Besides being a compelling cultural event for the public, this exhibition is, for me personally, the confirmation of a long-standing appreciation and a creative friendship.

Samios and I have several passions and interests in common. Mainly, we share an interest in various complex techniques, such as encaustic painting, or other simpler ones, traditional or modern, that require knowledge, skill and craftsmanship.

These, after all, are some of the key elements that I recognise in his art and I unreservedly consider him to be one of the most important Greek artists.

May the art loving public enjoy Samios’s exhibition; may it savour and share with the artist paintings filled with passion, life, daring, eroticism, glory and optimism, in what the artist describes as a metaphysical and creative life game.

In almost all of Pavlos Samios’s paintings, there is a red object: it may be fire, it may be wine, it may be a dress, it may be a watermelon. But in most of his paintings, it’s a pair of red pumps. I believe this is more than just a fetish.

Red, the colour of uprising, and pumps, an accessory for a suggestive walk, signal and open new roads. Roads that lead to “this small, this great world”, to the world of Pavlos Samios’s paintings.

These are works filled with the Mediterranean sun and sea, but mostly filled with Mediterranean rhythms. There are solid, luscious women like archaic goddesses or like figureheads. There are dragons, like the ones that represented the bodies of rivers in antiquity; dragons like the one killed by Saint George or like the jailer guarding the captive princess in fairytales. And there are winged horses, like Pegasus, like the horses of the Apocalypse, or the wooden horses at country fairs.

In Pavlos Samios’s works, everything is presented without equivocation, without the maquillage of chiaroscuro and perspective. Everything is accessible and tangible, “all hard like shells, you can hold them in your palm.”

And all this is achieved because Pavlos Samios, a connoisseur of Byzantine painting, possesses the accoutrements of Greek art, from antiquity to the present day.

Thus, Pavlos Samios, a mystic of the Greek perspective, talks to us about the eternity of the ephemeral, using a language as contemporary and familiar as the one that has assimilated and exceeded tradition.

We thank him warmly for the honour of exhibiting his work in Kremmydi.

We hope that our obvious joy at having him here and the rhythms of Cephalonia will justify his love for our island and his presence here.

581

582

583

584

585

586

Pavlos Samios Yiannis Moralis: Teacher, friend and father Kathimerini, 10 April 1994

Teacher, friend and father.

In this tribute to my teacher, the painter Yiannis Moralis, I will talk about my studies with him at the School of Fine Arts in the late 1960s.

After attending a preparatory class with Nikos Nikolaou, I came to Moralis’s workshop when I was 18 years old and very keen to learn. I found myself in a small but warm space and I was made welcome by the older students. Working in that workshop, one felt the love and freedom in the air, like a spring breeze.

The teacher, always cheerful, talked to us about the art of painting, discussed our work, and instilled deep within us the sense that we were doing this because we wanted to, not because we had to.

His sense of humour and the jokes he related made for a unique, warm, cheerful and vibrant atmosphere.

They called it “The Workshop of Love”, and indeed it was.

To safeguard the freedom of each one of us as an individual, but especially as a young painter, was his primary concern. When someone painted differently than the way he taught us, he allowed them to continue and indeed he enjoyed it, because it provided a new topic for discussion.

He forged a personal relationship with each one of us. Moralis was a teacher, but also a friend and a spiritual father. With him we talked about all of our problems.

Our admiration for his work was great. It’s rare to have a very good teacher who is also a very good painter. He never held up his paintings as examples when teaching and he never physically corrected any of our works. It was the first workshop where we painted while listening to music. The ambience and overall attitude were such that almost none of us failed to advance to the next year.

I will now briefly discuss the theory of his teaching, as I experienced it.

After drawing on the canvas, he taught us to look at our subject “from a painter’s point of view”, i.e., to analyse the realistic forms into spots of colour. The example he used was the mosaic, in which the tesserae that make up the forms are spots of colour.

Years later, when I met Tsarouchis in Paris, he told me that he first understood painting when he copied the Medusa mosaic.

At the same time, Moralis used in his teaching the theory of the French Impressionist Cézanne, on which the art of our century was based. Cézanne eliminated perspective and restored archetypal geometric shapes.

This abstract and rationalist thinking represents our century’s illuminated opening to art. It’s no mere coincidence that Moralis had placed photographs of paintings by major artists in a showcase in the workshop, so that we could benefit from studying them. I think Moralis attributed the greatest importance to composition, perhaps because by nature he is a man of order and rational consistency. I believe that his obsession with composition derives from his study of archaic funerary steles.

He never crammed our heads with theories about the various “Schools”.

Instead, he taught us the fundamentals of how painting is done.

We have retained our friendship – I still see Moralis, mainly on Aegina and at the openings of various exhibitions. Always when we meet he’ll tell us the latest jokes in his inimitable way so that the cheerful ambience of the workshop remains unchanged to this day.

He is the kind of teacher who never misses the openings of exhibitions of his colleagues and students. He was present at all my solo exhibitions, as a teacher and as a friend.

To conclude, I would like to thank Kathimerini for giving me the opportunity to say a few words, from the heart, about Moralis the Teacher.

I wish him all the best.

P.S.

587