«I turned the fear of death into the verve of life»

An apparently realistic painting, bordering on the surreal, touches the realm of fantasy and transforms the realistic image into a theatrical event. Its figures and shadows constitute a universe of symbolism and allegory, where the evident and prosaic image acquires the dimensions of a familiar legend. It’s the reminiscence of the near past, of bygone days, belying the negation produced by our unrestrained age. This is what always happens in both life and art and apparently, this is the reason why Stavros Hatzioannou’s painting is universally accepted, where questions are asked and there is a high probability of finding the answers.

When vision functions in the faintest light, the rest of the senses are heightened: The various musics, the touch of the bodies, the taste of a kiss, the smells and the aromas, the clicking of heels locked in the twirling of a dance of shadows.

In the bright, rich, profuse light, we recognise and plainly read reality, something that is of no interest to art, which prefers to fumble and explore areas where the truth and the lie can hide side by side. Areas like the ones in Stavros Hatzioannou, where the shadows glide in an eternal dance of the senses, where hesitations and desires co-exist, where anything can happen in one night, no matter if it’s the first or the last of an exciting fantasy, where whispers mingle with the sounds and rhythms, where there’s always the possibility to experience something fatal or something thrilling, where the night might be our first and our last together.

Where time takes supernatural dimensions, a single figure observes what happens center stage, motionless like melancholy itself, one we’ll never see again if we withdraw our eyes, even for a minute.

I wonder, whether absence also has a face?

 Aristides Yiayianos

The Poetic of the Inaccessible

Nowadays, figurative painting, aside from certain experiences, like the London School with Bacon and Lucien Freud, from pop-art and hyperrealism with their particular underlying intentions or the more recent School of Leipzig, headed by Neo Rauch and Tilo Baumgärtner, struggles for the favour of the audience. Those who, like Stavros Hatzioannou, work with traditional means and keep their distance from the self-proclaimed avant-garde movement and the postulants of modernity, are often confronted with incomprehension and ostracism. This refusal is often based on the very limited conception of the term modernity. We can allow that the striking changes in the condition of our existence and the new aspect of the world offered by science, demand new forms of expression. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that science and art occupy two completely different fields. Or that art, primarily, deals with the sensory perception, which is always figurative. Even if science contests that there are other forms of understanding, beyond those most familiar to us, our space in life is dominated by our familiar objects. Besides, I think that figuration retains a privileged watchtower in thematically treating and analysing the changes in our everyday environment.

The widespread misconception that, since the invention of photography, art was liberated from the mission to represent the material world, is certainly at the root of this detachment from figuration. But, the role of art is not limited to a simple representation. “Art does not reproduce the visual world, but renders the world visible”. This quote by Paul Klee (although he said it in a different context) can be also applied to realism. Realism’s sole objective should not be the plain representation of the visible world, a representation notably mimetic, but mainly the discovery of whatever lies beneath it (for example the objective social structures) and at the same time, offer us a representation more like a mental and shared cultural reality. Figurative painting should, in my view, aim at offering us a subjective look upon the world: the experience of reality.

Stavros Hatzioannou is tirelessly committed to this task. His everyday scenes, trivial as they may seem, are still a metaphorical look on the world and urge us towards a reading and a continuous discovery of images, because he does not deal with the existentia, but rather with the essentia of things. His painting transports us to a mental space, complex and universal, inviting us to explore the perception of things and touching our most sensitive fibres, leading us to face our inner abyss.

In his popular dancing scenes, the cafés, the bedrooms, all radiating a certain cold eroticism that intrigues and draws us in its nets, we find a series of recurrent elements, like the gloves or the veils and masks, elements that assist us in better understanding the artist’s work. The sexual connotations of the gloves do not have to be demonstrated. As early as the XII century, we come across this theme, in the work of Andreas Capellanus «De amore et de amoris remedio». More recently, in the 1878, the symbolic painter Max Klinger, with whom Stavros Hatzioannou shares a common interest in the iconic female universe, caused a stir with the presentation in Berlin of his circle of engravings «Paraphrase Ueber Den Fund Eines Handschuhes»¹, a dramatic reverie he had been working on for twenty years, after finding on the Berliner Hasenheide ice rink a lost glove belonging to an elegant Brasilian woman. His work, in classic workmanship, sparked so many fantasies, since the gloves are a kind of second skin, in direct contact with it and give us access to a certain intimacy with the person who wears them.

Another recurring element in the painter’s work, are the veiled or masked women. The veil gives them an aura of mystery. They hide themselves and their history behind the veil. The veil is both obscurity and distance. But, at the same time, it suggests, allows to guess, to imagine. It is charged with multiple meanings and its function is both real and fictitious. It is used in cults and rituals, in magic, in fashion and the presentation of the body in contexts such as eroticism and fetishism, while at the same time it remains a metaphoric text and image of the highest order. Given that the veil is both text and textile and acts as the “absolute metaphor” (Hans Blumenberg) and a means to “represent the unrepresentable” (Ralf Konersmann), it forms a sign, an omen to interpret, according to the viewer’s personal experiences. Everyone finds their role, their part. The veil unveils the unspoken signs of love. Gilles Deleuze, analyzing the work of Proust affirms that “to fall in love, is to individualize someone by the signs they wear or emit. It is to become conscious of these signs, to learn”².

Other iconic elements, like the force of the flowing female hair or the open shawls, in vibrant colors, and loose garments, dull and transparent or half-torn, open for us secret passages, transporting us to the Caliph’s fable, cited by Marc Le Bot³. In this Arabic tale, the monarch orders a dancer to slowly remove her clothes, one by one. Wanting her more nude still, he has her tear away her skin.

Another feature of Stavros Hatzioannou’s painting is the voluntary vagueness of the faces, usually turned the other way. For Dominique Baqué⁴ in modern painting the face has lost throughout the decades the greater part of its attributes: it is no longer the territory of evidence and identification, no longer the bridge between our subjectivity and the world and is not presented to us neither as something certain nor vulnerable, but rather as indifferent. Baudrillard had remarked as early as the 90’s about our attitude towards the face and the representation of reality, the passage from metamorphosis to indifference. Even earlier, Roland Barthes had already announced and analysed another important change: the transition between two iconic eras, represented respectively by Greta Garbo and Audrey Hepburn. The first incarnating the essence, the idea; the second, the morphological, the eventual. Identity no longer resides in the facial features, because the singularity of the faces has been replaced by the artificiality and the possibility of their transformation and reconstruction. Generally, we can admit that each era defines the faces it produces⁵ and these faces can and must be seen as a symbolic and cultural construction. It seems logical that being immersed in a technological context, this process of facial detachment will become even more pronounced, making room for a post-human aesthetics, which will conclude in the definite triumph of the skin and the surface on the identity and the subjective interiority.

In Stavros Hatzioannou’s work, the faces are not portraits, not even imaginary. We are not dealing with portraits, a word whose etymology comes from the Latin per-trahere, meaning to recall someone’s memory and whose essential function is to artistically assign a certain identity in a convincing form. Here, the figures do not radiate individual features, such as character, personality or originality but rather an existential particularity, firmly anchored in the realm of the essential and thus evade any rational interpretation. Instead of showing narrative sequences, he places animistic contexts in the foreground.

On a different level, these figures represent the paradox of our modern world. The anonymity, far from being a social exclusion, is rather becoming a strategy –both individual and collective- defying the inflexibility of control. In cities invaded by surveillance cameras, where each individual is identified, the power of anonymity lies in the ability to open spaces of liberty, not controlled by the powers that be. Apart from Robert Musil’s Man without features, new ways of understanding identity begin to emerge, such as the virtual world of Second Life.

According to Georges Bataille⁶, “it is possible to describe eroticism as the proof of life, until within death”. But how can we represent this complexity in art? How is it possible to render it with this blend of poetry and crudity, like Marguerite Duras in “Blue eyes, white hair”? In an oversexed world, it seems obscene to speak of love. Roland Barthes⁷ describes this phenomenon: “Discredited by modern opinion, the sentimentality of love should be assumed by the enamoured as a strong transgression, which shall leave them alone and exposed. Due to a reversement of values, it is this very sentimentality that renders love obscene. (…) It is no longer the sexual that is indecent, but the sentimental”.

As recalled by Denis de Rougemont⁸ in «L’amour et l’Occident», the platonic philosophy which marked the western civilisation is essentially erotic: it is a glorification of the movement towards uniqueness, war, friction, Eros, “the passionate love”. Analysing the myth of Tristan, de Rougemont gives rise to the notion of “non-existent will” of erotic heroism. We could also take as example Calixte and Mélibée or Abelard and Eloïse to reach the same conclusion, despite the differences in each case. Since Eros is by definition impossible to assuage, the only possible end lies in death, the only instant when the tension finally relaxes. The writer proposes substituting the word Eros with Agape, the communion with the loved one⁹ but neither this resoundingly Christian preposition, nor the Nitschenian of falling in love for the sake of love ("we do not love life because we are accustomed to living, but because we are accustomed to loving"), nor even the highly theoretical “confluent love”¹⁰, analysed by Anthony Giddens, have taken hold in modern society.

Bataille finds eroticism in the distance between the bodies. The figures of Stavros Hatzioannou radiate this distance. But, the plastic art transforms them, makes them sublime, illustrates them and recovers their aesthetics. Here, Freud and Bataille rejoin: The beautiful, is but a displacement of the sexual. The actualization of desire, the passage to action, kills beauty. We find ourselves no longer in the realm of the beautiful but, according to Deleuze, the mere and vulgar consumption. This distance, much like the negation of sentimentality in the modern world, is the reason why the people in Hatzioannou’s works are bathed in an atmosphere of nostalgia and sadness, if not solitude (even solitude in groups of two)¹¹ and even a vague threat. A masterful blend of our desires and fears, in alignment with the thoughts of Pascal Quignard, who sees in the word desire, from the Latin desiderium, the falling of an asteroid (sidus) in the night: desire is disaster¹².

Hatzioannou’s painting makes little use of perspective and background. His is not the realism of the mythical Zeuxis of Herakleia who, according to Pliny, would paint a bunch of grapes on the wall with such realism, that even the sparrows would try to pick them off. Apart from the human figures comprising the scene (the secondary are often vague), we scarcely find a few isolated objects in the dim light. These objects, such as flowers (a classical fetish of the female sex) vases, chandeliers, etc, open the scene. We penetrate the mystery of memory, through the object that serves as intermediary. The memory attaches itself on an object, to find its reference, uses it as a key to return to the scene and replay it in its entirety. An everyday scene, purified from the memory of the superfluous, keeping only one detail, which will serve as a label to identify it.

Barthes’ affirmation about the romance can be applied to every kind of narration, even the pictorial, since it too makes a destiny of life, turns memory into useful action and gives a directed and significant time to duration. The symbolism in the work of Hatzioannou makes time stand still in the midst of a constantly accelerating life, and its significance is impregnated with a sense of eternity. Time is suspended, capricious like his two protagonists, life and death, doesn’t visit those who await him and does not reside in passion, but in indifference. This impossibility of love, with which we are confronted as spectators of his work, creates a strange fascination¹³ that, in the words of Pascal Quignard “impedes the viewer from averting his glance. He is immobilised where he stands”. The rapport between art and desire that has primarily governed the arts in past centuries, was of Apollonian nature. It relied on admiration from a distance. The paintings of Stavros Hatzioannou move us and force us to establish a dialogue with our memories and our fears, crystallizing thus the interpretation of art, according to the other two great Gods of aesthetics: Pan and Dionysus.

Xabier AURTENETXE

Stavros Hatzioannou and the Beast called Soul (Psyche)

To begin with: The work of Stavros Hatzioannou is the product of an instinct nourished by a solid common sense. The light decides what lives and what dies in the realm of his painted compositions. Here we have a merciless judge, who nevertheless knows his business well. He knows how to reveal secrets, to recall guilts, to interpret behaviours and shed light on well-hidden motives.

And then comes the color to give a bodily dimension to the light, to fill the painting with stalactites and stalagmites of molten time. Slowly dripping in the painting’s veins, to officiate the details of the forms and themes, thus relating their own lives. Through the compelling dialectic of light and shadow.

Even better: In the dominium of semidarkness. Where shadows become autonomous and the borders between real and imaginary become blurred.

Notice this peculiar function of darkness. Velvety, awe-inspiring, like a balmy night near a silent sea, velvety like an abyss where worlds and dreams twirl together, where the sinners proudly carry their transgressions, like absolute flares of existence.

The darkness gives birth to the poet and the light fulfills his purpose. History hatches her egg in the shadows and revolution broods the destinies of men. Forever and ever!

Then, it is the turn of painting to baptize the ephemeral in the tears of eternity. The time when the works of a certain art, become works of art. And the initiates are given the stamp of donation. Because not everyone is privy to these secrets. And there are times when the unknown is more important than the familiar. And more prestigious.

As in the case of Stavros Hatzioannou’s painting, where mystery is the rule and where the composition functions like both tableau vivant and theatrical act, which the audience has to complete. Rendering themselves accomplices.

Who, in truth, is this mysterious figure, wandering from painting to painting? Is she a woman, a lover, a fairy or simply the shadow of a fantasy haunting our waking dreams? If indeed she is a ghost, how come her reflection is so finely depicted in the mirror? Maybe because for Hatzioannou, the act of painting is an erotic process, where pleasure always comes at a price. Irrevocably. And the reflection does not describe, but rather suggests.

This unity continues and completes the circle painted by the artist in 2005-6 and exhibited in Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery. Things are now reaching their climax with fiery and absolute choices, both artistically and existentially. The passions living in the chiaroscuro now demand their vindication through the same chiaroscuro. Till the ultimate annihilation. The dialectic game of life. The dialectic game of art. Or the endurance of painting, which can still speak of things forgotten or marginalised by the politically correct expression. And the trend, which shatters every cohesion and continuity. Because I, personally, prefer creations that interpret the roots of human sadness, to the art that simply decorates the vanity of human happiness. The creation that, by hurting, assuages our inner loneliness and dares speak of that dark, untamed beast we call –for brevity’s sake– “soul”.

Who knows? Maybe in Hatzioannou’s shadows, dark places and deafening silences orchestrated in gamuts of earthly and deep blue-greens, you too might suddenly come across your very soul…

Manos Stephanidis

P.S. Typically speaking, Hatzioannou’s painting is irrigated by the numerous versions of realism that appeared in pre-war Europe - Derain, De Chirico, Sironi, Beckmann, Balthus – and by a cinematic style between film noir and fantasy (what is today represented by the movies of Guillermo del Toro).

On the other hand, when we typically discuss painting, as if placing it in little art history boxes, we might win in scholarship, but definitely lose in essence.

I hope, with this text to have evaded the snag. Whoever might want to see more, can consult the Réalismes catalogue, by Centre Pompidou (1981). The title’s plural is indicative of the multiplicity of the term. Also, the concise book by Brendan Prendeville, Réalism in 20th Century Painting, Thames and Hudson-World of Art, 2000.

Happy reading!