Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - In the
younger generation of Greek artists there is a gap of style for
expressionism the contemporary way. Though loads of artworks are
occupied by expressionist style deformation, most of the times they
lack consistency. Only a few Greek artists in the last 40 years
managed to remain loyal to their expressionistic form, and they are
the ones who really appeal to a wider international audience.
Consistency of expressionism without punctual repetition is an aspect
of style less elementary than creating a personal identifiable style
in Visual Arts. In this manner, the expressionist style I saw when I
have first seen Fotis Klogeri's series “Metro in Thessaloniki”
struck me positively; the expressionist style is consistent through
the series but each artwork is totally discernible from any other,
even though the palette of the artist observes the variety of colour. Prominent and established Greek artists such as Kostis Georgiou are showing the road for a Greek expressionism to dominate our small corner of the world, and widen to the international discource of art styles of Now. The birth of descendants of the style can only be the cause for rejoice.
Comparing
the artists' style to the international experience of the last
decades, Klogeri someone can claim he has nothing new to offer;
dozens of significant American and central European artists have
contributed to the Urban landscape of visual arts with a similar
approach. However, the built of these styles is rare that they come
from Mediterranean countries. Nevertheless, in a second reading of
the works, something else comes up. From 1400 to 1800, Western art
was dominated by Renaissance-inspired academic theories of idealized
painting and high art executed by either groups or grand masters. By
the Industrial Revolution times, there was a turn towards realism of
subject, actually, setting the subject matter outside the “High
Art” tradition. The term “Realism” itself was promoted by the
French novelist Champfleury during the 1840s, although it began its
formal use in 1855, with an Exposition by the French painter Gustave
Courbet (1819-77), after one of his paintings (The Painter's Studio)
had been rejected by the Universal Exhibition. Courbet set up his own
marquee nearby and issued a manifesto to accompany his personal
exhibition. It was entitled "Le Realisme". The style of
Realist painting spread to all genres instantly. Apart from pure
style, realist artists would then be lured into a turn on their
subjects: urban working class life, street-life, cafes, night clubs
and brothels and a frank eye in the treatment of the body, nudity and
sensuality. Realists portrayed real people not idealized types. From
now on, artists felt increasingly free to depict real-life
situations, reflecting a shift in the significance and function of
art. On the other hand, Expressionism as a modernist movement
originating in Germany presents the world solely from a subjective
perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to
evoke moods or ideas, and express the meaning of emotional experience
rather than physical reality. In an urban environment this is done
not on the canvas of the artist but within the visual range of each
one of its occupants.
Envisioning
the everyday experience on the canvas is one thing, while capturing
the emotional effect and the impression of environment itself
stripped of the human presence, into the soul of the city
stroller/inhabitant I a totally other. Forms deriving from massive
construction in the heart of the city are distorted or exaggerated
and colors are intensified for emotive or expressive purposes. The
lighting of the paintings is also exceptional, mainly because the
artist doesn't resolute to the easy solution of creating a dark
utopia. On the contrary, the heavy lines defining forms are full of
light and vividness, imposing a real life environment to whoever has
been strolling around a major Greek city as Thessaloniki, the place
depicted in the canvases. As a result, the paintings seem familiar
or constant to the actual environment, not excluding, but at least
subsidizing the Utopia/Dystopia counterbalancing from the discourse,
and enforcing the discussion of the transformation of the city into a
massive lab giving birth to highly disputed future, leading the way
for a powerful mode of social criticism to take place.