The"radiance of the visible" in the work of Yiannis Fokas
"The artist, then, under the names of depth, space and colour, seeks exactly this inner revitalization, this radiance of the visible".
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Eye and the Spirit
Through a specific route among significant works of art of the last decade (1986-1997), works which possess the recognizable characteristics, the palindromic, renewed shapes and transformations of the inter-crossing elements of a clearly defined personal style, which is based on research, on the processing and application of principles and methods of differing painting systems, Yiannis Fokas has created a body of work characterized by boldness, "anger" and meditation, challenging and always open to the unpredictable, which transcends mental conception and the intuitive approach and reaches the psychology of the profound. His work, therefore, appears certain and durable, as it is being constantly re-christened, following the interlinked units of an unbroken sequence and a series of "violent" break-ups, with an assault of emotions and gestures.
The nature of his work, as an everyday, intellectual necessity, from his early creations to the more recent ones, fearlessly shapes itself after the international influences, "organizing the world anew in accordance with the works of art, and organizing the works of art in accordance with the world".1
This eclectic attitude of inventing and using inter-related or contradictory elements of a structural, narrative function which are connected with the field of meanings (aesthetic, theoretical interpretations, historical quality of universal shapes) and the timelessness of the references, is part of the multi-level processes of reproduction of universal painting gestures, of the representations of the history of figures and images which belong to the sphere of the Great Abstraction.
The artist himself fights and overcomes the dangers of exhibiting an impersonal, repetitive style of painting, which refers to the international movements which he has experienced and assimilated during his long stay in Paris (abstract expressionism, gestural art, Neo-expressionism, Cobra, Franz Kline, Pierre Soulages, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Robert Motherwell, Spanish tradition, Antoni Tapies, Japanese tradition and avant-garde).
The work of Yiannis Fokas, suspended between material reality and the metaphysical dimension of time, cannot be interpreted merely as an abstract image of co-existing colours, gestures, merging of shapes with infinite possibilities of expression, differentiated layers of materials with changeable attitudes. Instead, it can be regarded as nature/material, attitude/behaviour, as it seeks the psycho-intellectual participation of the viewer. It is a material of life that has been experienced, an open space of endless transformations, with a changeable plurality of ways of rendering, of assimilated images and types of colour and gesture, tracers of the conception of the absolute.
In his attempt to grasp, capture, possess and interpret the essence of even the most common everyday things, Yiannis Fokas assaults all the dimensions of the painting field, he tests and tames his materials and his qualities, causing their transformation and contradiction.
The need to arrange space through units of shapes and the combining of painting episodes (inset autonomous interventions with renewed circles which interrupt the continuity and perplexity of the narration in favour of non-covertness) causes the interweaving of starting points or of inertia (over-active points or "inert", areas of arranged regularity or discontinuation of the composition, overt or covert aspect of the same shape but with a differentiating conception and rendering, a two-way passing from multiplicity to unity, a revelation of the complexity or a cover-up of the superfluous, of the unexpected and of the sequence of shapes).
This agonizing search for balancing the opposites does not weaken the inner tensions and influences or the external explosions which break up the regularity of comprehension. On the contrary, they reinforce the possibility of presenting one element within the other (a concord of shapes, reinforced transmutated recalls) and of revealing their autonomy (proportions, contiguities, connections, sequences).
The excessive expansive gesture and its metaphysical dimension
Yiannis Fokas makes use of invented "painting games"2 and makes them part of a plot and a complexity of heterogenous shapes ("exiled" forms insistently recurring), and of the expansive gesture and violence of colours causing inner narrations and sequential metaphors (closed or open shapes, still or explosive, an arrangement of contradicting forces/trends of an automatic and controlled style, a conflict of gestures which arise from "accidents, Repetition results in the deeper search in its existence".3
Through the conflict of opposing principles for the discovery of a structured balance, Yiannis Fokas lays on, welds, juxtaposes and reconciles colour and design, the stabilization or explosion of material, he constantly analyses the composition of the work by installing dubious points of representation and external dynamic elements (pencil, aluminum), materials which are contradictory and define the limits of the composition. Real space and painting space become identical as they support the third sculptural dimension and an almost opposing duality of colours. This physical quality of painting, its sculptural treatment, leads to the progressive revelation of a metaphysical form of the work, in secret networks of dreamlike or real, psychic situations of the time and space of memory.
Memory is presented here as a "spiral motion which, through brief descriptions of personal or biographical facts and episodes, fakes us back to the almost inert constellation of possibilities that narration evokes".4
Faithful and committed to himself, uninfluenced by the imitative dictates of what is current, he makes a statement of the principles and rules of a personal system with definite innate behaviours which affect the inner, existentialist experience of time, as an art material, and the cyclical form of a journey through time, encountering the evident or obscure points of structures made by memory. It captures the moment when "the act of painting, which was once feasible, becomes real, moving towards its completion".5
He is, today, at the point of the expiation of an outburst of demonic multiplicity of colours, of the "physicality" of his materials and of the overextension of limits.
Works of purification and silent tensions, works in motion with constant chargings and dischargings of painting, which testify to the inner diffusion of the energy of a catalytic passion, of an anger that has immaterialized and of a wrath which is tender in flow and attitude. The intellectual time that has been experienced enters our soul as an experience in time.
1. Nelson Goodman, "Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols", Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, p.241.
2. I refer here to the "language-games" of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the specially arranged areas in which the whole of human activity can be separated and which, through the use of language, give it their own meanings, Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lectures on Religious Faith".
3 & 4. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Process".
5. Claude Bremond. "La Logique des Possibles Narratifs". Communications No 8, 1966, pp.60-76.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Eye and the Spirit
Through a specific route among significant works of art of the last decade (1986-1997), works which possess the recognizable characteristics, the palindromic, renewed shapes and transformations of the inter-crossing elements of a clearly defined personal style, which is based on research, on the processing and application of principles and methods of differing painting systems, Yiannis Fokas has created a body of work characterized by boldness, "anger" and meditation, challenging and always open to the unpredictable, which transcends mental conception and the intuitive approach and reaches the psychology of the profound. His work, therefore, appears certain and durable, as it is being constantly re-christened, following the interlinked units of an unbroken sequence and a series of "violent" break-ups, with an assault of emotions and gestures.
The nature of his work, as an everyday, intellectual necessity, from his early creations to the more recent ones, fearlessly shapes itself after the international influences, "organizing the world anew in accordance with the works of art, and organizing the works of art in accordance with the world".1
This eclectic attitude of inventing and using inter-related or contradictory elements of a structural, narrative function which are connected with the field of meanings (aesthetic, theoretical interpretations, historical quality of universal shapes) and the timelessness of the references, is part of the multi-level processes of reproduction of universal painting gestures, of the representations of the history of figures and images which belong to the sphere of the Great Abstraction.
The artist himself fights and overcomes the dangers of exhibiting an impersonal, repetitive style of painting, which refers to the international movements which he has experienced and assimilated during his long stay in Paris (abstract expressionism, gestural art, Neo-expressionism, Cobra, Franz Kline, Pierre Soulages, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Robert Motherwell, Spanish tradition, Antoni Tapies, Japanese tradition and avant-garde).
The work of Yiannis Fokas, suspended between material reality and the metaphysical dimension of time, cannot be interpreted merely as an abstract image of co-existing colours, gestures, merging of shapes with infinite possibilities of expression, differentiated layers of materials with changeable attitudes. Instead, it can be regarded as nature/material, attitude/behaviour, as it seeks the psycho-intellectual participation of the viewer. It is a material of life that has been experienced, an open space of endless transformations, with a changeable plurality of ways of rendering, of assimilated images and types of colour and gesture, tracers of the conception of the absolute.
In his attempt to grasp, capture, possess and interpret the essence of even the most common everyday things, Yiannis Fokas assaults all the dimensions of the painting field, he tests and tames his materials and his qualities, causing their transformation and contradiction.
The need to arrange space through units of shapes and the combining of painting episodes (inset autonomous interventions with renewed circles which interrupt the continuity and perplexity of the narration in favour of non-covertness) causes the interweaving of starting points or of inertia (over-active points or "inert", areas of arranged regularity or discontinuation of the composition, overt or covert aspect of the same shape but with a differentiating conception and rendering, a two-way passing from multiplicity to unity, a revelation of the complexity or a cover-up of the superfluous, of the unexpected and of the sequence of shapes).
This agonizing search for balancing the opposites does not weaken the inner tensions and influences or the external explosions which break up the regularity of comprehension. On the contrary, they reinforce the possibility of presenting one element within the other (a concord of shapes, reinforced transmutated recalls) and of revealing their autonomy (proportions, contiguities, connections, sequences).
The excessive expansive gesture and its metaphysical dimension
Yiannis Fokas makes use of invented "painting games"2 and makes them part of a plot and a complexity of heterogenous shapes ("exiled" forms insistently recurring), and of the expansive gesture and violence of colours causing inner narrations and sequential metaphors (closed or open shapes, still or explosive, an arrangement of contradicting forces/trends of an automatic and controlled style, a conflict of gestures which arise from "accidents, Repetition results in the deeper search in its existence".3
Through the conflict of opposing principles for the discovery of a structured balance, Yiannis Fokas lays on, welds, juxtaposes and reconciles colour and design, the stabilization or explosion of material, he constantly analyses the composition of the work by installing dubious points of representation and external dynamic elements (pencil, aluminum), materials which are contradictory and define the limits of the composition. Real space and painting space become identical as they support the third sculptural dimension and an almost opposing duality of colours. This physical quality of painting, its sculptural treatment, leads to the progressive revelation of a metaphysical form of the work, in secret networks of dreamlike or real, psychic situations of the time and space of memory.
Memory is presented here as a "spiral motion which, through brief descriptions of personal or biographical facts and episodes, fakes us back to the almost inert constellation of possibilities that narration evokes".4
Faithful and committed to himself, uninfluenced by the imitative dictates of what is current, he makes a statement of the principles and rules of a personal system with definite innate behaviours which affect the inner, existentialist experience of time, as an art material, and the cyclical form of a journey through time, encountering the evident or obscure points of structures made by memory. It captures the moment when "the act of painting, which was once feasible, becomes real, moving towards its completion".5
He is, today, at the point of the expiation of an outburst of demonic multiplicity of colours, of the "physicality" of his materials and of the overextension of limits.
Works of purification and silent tensions, works in motion with constant chargings and dischargings of painting, which testify to the inner diffusion of the energy of a catalytic passion, of an anger that has immaterialized and of a wrath which is tender in flow and attitude. The intellectual time that has been experienced enters our soul as an experience in time.
1. Nelson Goodman, "Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols", Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, p.241.
2. I refer here to the "language-games" of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the specially arranged areas in which the whole of human activity can be separated and which, through the use of language, give it their own meanings, Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lectures on Religious Faith".
3 & 4. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Process".
5. Claude Bremond. "La Logique des Possibles Narratifs". Communications No 8, 1966, pp.60-76.
Sania Papa,
Art Critic, Curator,
Dr, Lecturer of History of Art,
Department of Visual and Applied Arts,
School of Fine Arts,
Aristotle University Thessaloniki,
1997
Art Critic, Curator,
Dr, Lecturer of History of Art,
Department of Visual and Applied Arts,
School of Fine Arts,
Aristotle University Thessaloniki,
1997
