"In the sleeping-bag of the visibles my captivity lies"
Nikos Karouzos
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For Yiannis Fokas, painting constitutes an initiation procedure related with the invisible, through miraculously apparent, metaphysical aspect of the picture. His works epitomize adequately and on a native standard the whole drama of European painting in the past twenty years, the whole determination of the painted figure to remain autonomous and independent opposite the electronic storm of figures that are produced vulgarly and are consumed like supermarket products.
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Painting is still charged with the great responsibility of defending the visual culture of the western world, of giving shape to the utopia of novelty which is closely related to the despair of its own defeat, of arguing about the modern world's capability of still communicating through pictures. Therefore, a picture should not be regarded as an alibi for a wet dream, but as a dream that can, even if intuitively, lead to hidden truths and blast deceptive appearances in the hope of revealing the reality of things. This is exactly what the goal of today's painting should be: to insist on the latent poetry of things, on their hidden intensity and, by illuminating figures, to eliminate the omni-present vulgarity, in favor of a grace that has been drugged deep in the nucleus of matter.
Yiannis Fokas suspends in mid-air between transparencies that seek for ontological certainties which like a well-bottom will help them be, and scriptures that even before they become speech, abandon themselves into the lust and the bacchanal of the scream. Scream-scripture, flow-breath, transparency-surface, operation-co-operation, action-section, picture the bulwark of a loneliness that seeks its way into the world.
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Quo vadis today painting? Where are you going today, painting?
Yiannis Fokas is a European artist that claims the Kavafean pride "not philhellene but greek", an artist that will narrate the clumsily covered up tragedy of this country in the name of a suspicious, upstart happiness that should be demonstrated with dignity and responsibility. With the cosmopolitan tolerance that has always characterized this country, and before the teratogenesis of the Greek state-hybrid and the emergence of the red-hot Greeks of the abridgement and the retreat, we should acknowledge that our country is the whole world, our art is of this world, an art that may grow here but can exist everywhere, since both the tears and the laughter are shared within the family of the world.
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Here is a painting that resists, trudging on the tracks of knowledge, instinctive experience, fears and liberating overturns. Looking at Fokas' still lifes, with that earthen feeling of things, with their deep existential constructivity (aufbauen) that Martin Heidegger would discern, with their despondent presence-absence, as George Chemonas, the last Renaissance representative of our country would lament.
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When will the end come? - When the picture ends up a deafening but one-way noise and when speech can no longer be transformed into a picture.
Yiannis Fokas' painting, complete but not self- complacent, awkward in its power yet tender in its weakness, full of memories of an indulgent gesture that could once tell the history of a whole world, is now content with piecing together the fragments of this world, miraculously achieving unity.
"Resist" was the command of Michael Katsaros in 1953, when he discovered the Sadducees in his con-temporary petit-bourgeois vulgarity of the emerging prosperity of the time.
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"Resist" seems to be the command of today's painting. I am afraid however that it is like talking to ears that are stuffed with the wax and the mud of the Sirens.