“Panic in the streets and in the hearts” – this is the name suggested by Antonis Samarakis for his solo exhibition. George Ioannou, in 1973. The artist was then 47 years old and entered his most mature, creative and productive phase. Samarakis’s commentary, which was veiled political in nature, spoke of a pronounced anti-militarist spirit of the works and directly connected the stories “told” by the boxes with the life of the city and its inhabitants, with its anxieties, social isolation, chaos and cruelty. modern mechanical world. But could there really be such a “dark” artist who literally bathed in colors, loved comics and included elements of pop art in his pictorial lexicon?

“Ioannou’s work is outwardly ridiculous, but deep down they are nightmarish. His paintings excite children, but at the same time briefly hold the eye of an adult viewer looking for repetitive motifs that “open up” his visual world,” says art historian and curator of OPANDA exhibitions and events Christoforos Marinos, who curates the large retrospective exhibition “Giorgos Ioannou. Internal route.

“Images of Ioannou may not cause spontaneous laughter, but they are entertaining, in the same way that solving a crossword puzzle, solving a complex puzzle, or reading a long novel is entertaining and relaxing. Indeed, in order to read them and connect with them, a mental, internal process is needed,” adds the curator of the exhibition.

Our conversation with Mr. Marino takes place the day before the opening last Wednesday, and the installation of the exhibition is complete. The two buildings of the Art Gallery of the Municipality of Athens in Metaxourgio host more than 170 works by the artist, a meticulous display of his work exactly 20 years after his last retrospective at the Arts Center. The curatorial line follows a chronological course beginning in the 1960s and running through Ioannou’s career in subsequent decades, ending in 2008. Almost to the end of his life – he passed away in 2017 – he continued to work hard and hard, despite serious health problems.

“Ioannou was an artist-writer. Each of his paintings is also a densely written page,” says Christoforos Marinos.

“Ioannou was an artist-writer,” comments Mr. Marinos. “Each of his paintings is also a densely written page, at least that’s how it should be treated. Like illustrated comics, his paintings are highly narrative, focusing on people and current events. He was at the same time a painter-collector, in the sense that the pictorial space in his paintings is an imaginary museum in which all sorts of strange images and objects are collected. There are also cities, real and imagined, in fact memories of the cities in which he lived, exhibited and traveled. Besides his beloved Athens, there are Paris, Milan, Venice, Ostend, London, Salzburg and Vienna.

The bet on the artist was to be able to draw like a child, tell tall tales for adults, expressing their feelings easily and unfiltered. This does not mean that reflections and social criticism are absent in his work. The works of the period 1970-75 are dominated by violence, which is sometimes overt and sometimes hidden, hidden by the technique of comics, giving the images an innocent and playful dimension. However, the symbols and motifs he uses bear witness to a society of control and repression: helicopters, machine guns and revolvers, daggers, matches, masked men, human targets, prisoners, soldiers and tanks, warships and planes, aircraft carriers, demonstrators and battles.

Since the beginning of the 80s, the painter has captured various symbols of environmental destruction in his works. His painting, at least most of it, was also a protest against the “deterioration of things”, accompanied by nostalgia for the irretrievably lost, like lampposts uprooted from the streets of Athens. Its symbols are carefully studied and stem from memories and (traumatic) experiences that begin with the years of occupation and the Civil War.

“George Ioannou. Internal route”, until January 29.