CULTURE

Commitment to ‘pure’ painting at the Benaki

A private art collection is foremost a reflection of the owner’s personal taste. In the case of the collection owned by lawyer Sotiris Felios, it is also a partial but fairly representative view of the development of the figurative style in Greek painting from the late 1980s to the present. «The Perspective of Time. Pictorial Histories: Paintings from the Sotiris Felios Collection,» an exhibition taking place at the Pireos Street annex of the Benaki Museum and the first public viewing of this private art collection, brings together the work of six artists who are more or less of the same generation – Christos Bokoros, Stefanos Daskalakis, Tassos Mantzavinos, Kostas Papanikolaou, Giorgos Rorris and Edouard Sacaillan – all of whom are now somewhere in their 50s (an exception is the younger Rorris). These are artists committed to «pure painting» and who work in a more or less realistic style with the human figure as their primary subject matter. Curated by Irini Orati, the Benaki exhibition presents the work of each artist separately yet also hopes to show the links between them. Full-bodied portraits of women appear both in the paintings of Rorris and Daskalakis. Both artists paint using a live model, a practice no longer as common as it used to be among contemporary artists. Rorris’s portraits are usually nudes. One example is the bold, large-scale portrait titled «Yianna» (2004-05) in the Benaki exhibition. The diagonal sweep of the floor – an angle that Rorris uses in much of his work – at the end of which the artist has positioned his model, adds a sense of drama. Often, the artist effects a sense of intensity with the use of a single color, as in the glowing red hue amid a composition of earthy tones in «Uninvited Gaze.» Texture and the masterful use of light to create a warm, velvety effect are noteworthy in the full-bodied portraits of women painted by Daskalakis. In most of his paintings, one has a sense of movement and agitation, an effect that Daskalakis produces by framing his subject from an oblique «bird’s eye» view. Mantzavinos’s paintings bring to mind a style akin to expressionism and also contain some references to folk art. According to the artist, his work is about «inspired melancholy and folly, cloudiness and the half-darkness.» A rather pessimistic view of the world also comes through in the work of Sacaillan. Mask-like faces and solitary people are recurring subjects in his pieces. A sweet nostalgia for a slower-paced lifestyle and for idyllic bare landscapes emanates through the bright paintings by Papanikolaou. The works from the Felios collection include a range of subject matters. Bokoros gives ordinary objects religious and sacred connotations. His compositions are quite minimal and are painted with such representational exactitude and realism as to give an illusionistic, trompe l’oeil effect. The paintings presented in the exhibition have also been reproduced in a large catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition. Besides the six artists featured in the museum, the book also includes works by Chronis Botsoglou and Yiannis Moralis, who are among the most important painters represented in the Felios collection. Orati’s complementary text is useful for introducing the reader to the particular collection and reflects on the nature of private collections. «The Perspective of Time. Pictorial Histories: Paintings from the Sotiris Felios Collection,» at the Benaki Museum Pireos Street annex (138 Pireos, tel 210.345.3338), to December 13. Meetings between the artists and the public continue this week on November 28 (with Stefanos Daskalakis and Giorgos Rorris).

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