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angelos spartalis

MY TROUBLID MINDA

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text also available in Greek

Angelos Spartalis's painting studio, Crete, October 2012

THE PAINTINGS

ALL WORKS ARE SIGNED WITH THE ARTISTS INITIALS AT THE FRONT AND SIGNED WITH HIS FULL NAME AND DATED AT THE BACK.

All artworks are oil on canvas except "Watching atomic bomb test", "Girl at X-ray tomography", "Christ Pantocrator" and Lucia's last post that are oil on wood and "Twetty", oil on metal.

The dimension are:
160 x 130 cm. the biggest ("Open city, praying woman", "Girl with pearl earring and brain cancer", "Aphrodite of Milos")
  30 x 40 cm. the smallest ("Woman" #1-7)
 

See here complete list of the artworks.

EXHIBITIONS

14 - 31 DECEMBER 2012
MUNICIPAL ART GALLERY OF AGHIOS NIKOLAOS, CRETE

15 APRIL - 11 MAY 2013
TITANIUM YIAYIANNOS GALLERY, ATHENS

12 - 31 JULY 2013
ART GALLERY L-S, ELOUNDA, CRETE

 

DOCUMENTS

HARD THINGS ARE HARDER TO PAINT
[ text also available in French and Greek ]

Can illness become art? Can it interpret “evil”? Isn’t this extremely cursory and ruthlessly cruel? Isn’t it insolent and at the same time provocative, just for the sake of creating impressions? Angelos Spartalis in his latest paintings – as he undertakes many different things, mostly cinema – approaches a subject that, whether we like it or not, concerns all of us: cancer. I think that this theme is rare and peculiar, perhaps even on a worldwide scale. Illness cannot be painted; let alone that no one wants or dares aestheticize it. We would simply wish to be done with it, before it’s done with us. Even in the most advanced societies, the primal fear of the Unknown still lurks.

Spartalis, continuing the narration of our era (the focus of his previous work was an “illustration" of the 70s) paints the Twin Towers, Andreas Papandreou and Mimi, Tse lying dead and Enola Gay, the bomber that threw the bomb at Nagasaki, along with figures with atrophic limbs due to thalidomide and children with brain cancer. “Christ" from Sina next to the girl with a pearl earring who suffers from cancer. History takes off its halo and reflects itself in the present. Who will paint contemporary teenagers with bare sculls? At this point of the narration, Spartalis gets to the heart of the matter. His Venus of Milos evokes Seurat and TV pixels – namely, it is painted with dots and relief strokes of the brush. Next to her, in juxtaposition, is an amputated mannequin from an anonymous store window. The diseased limb, the deficiency, illness as solution to the desperate demand for perfection, which we will never approach. There is a primary thrill, a renewed humanism that reinstates image to its ancient repute. Not to paint (to depict) but to look life in the eye dreaming its truth. Thus, Vermeer’s famous painting from Mauritshuis in Hague, with its girly big forehead, becomes a skull disfigured by radiation. Radiation… What a nice word for art or theology and at the same time, an alternative to chemotherapy. In the late 19th century Seurat introduced Divisionism by studying optical experience and the alternating reality of the Impressionists. At that time, the painter drew his inspiration from light and nature. Today, Spartalis draws his inspiration from television and photo reportage. There is definitely an element of humor in this intermediation but also something much deeper.

There are a lot of things, all mixed up: e.g. Tien An Men as well as motherhood in the face of his wife and every wife, new babies born out of love ,the sexual arousal of humans next to little children who fell ill before they even went to school. Terrible subjects, with an easy melodramatic approach, a moralistic teaching and kitsch lurking. The painter is mostly concerned about the collective cancer that is beleaguering the planet and which relates to power, corruption, ecological disaster, the gap between the saturated and the starving. He is not concerned so much about the individual cases for the sake of which his painting adopts tender, elegiac overtones, typical of an unfeigned humanism. What is the connection between sick children and the Twin Towers? Is it the metaphysical evil that oppresses the world, as modernité fantasized? Is it the Punishment of a vindictive Jehovah? Or is it the rogue Enlightenment that degenerated into artificial knowledge lacking a soul and into vulgar happiness lacking a conscience? Angelos Spartalis avoids all this like a master of past times, like Messi against Real’s defense. He engages in a comforting dialogue with History as well as with each individual story, he reflects on the fate of the planet with the primal emotion of an artist, he recalls the recent past, the sinking of our country and he dreams about tomorrow with innocence.
 

Manos Stefanidis, nothing more.
 

P.S.: I was annoyed, right from the start, by the title of the exhibition (“My troublid minda”) since I thought it was most likely, bad humor and an incongruous reference to lumpen heartache. When Spartalis explained it to me, I understood. A mutual friend died shortly after the detection of a galloping brain cancer. In the last weeks of her life, she would give incomprehensible answers to her friends' messages of support. Apparently, the illness had affected vital centers of thought and speech. Now, the title can be read in two ways, like the language of another kind of poetry, sunk in pain, desperation and, in some cases, hope.

PHOTOS

TITANIUM Yiayiannos gallery, April 2013, Athens

Municipal Art Gallery of Aghios Nikolaos, Crete, December 2012

Art Gallery L-S, Elounda, Crete, July 2013

Angelos Spartalis's painting studio, Crete, October 2012

Angelos Spartalis's painting studio, Crete, October 2012

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