“Nostalgia brought me very close to Kontoglu. I like to look at his work, especially his illustrations, because they inspire me. They activate my childhood. When I was little, I used to go to Agios Nikolaos with my grandmother, which he painted. I remember looking up the whole time of the liturgy,” Tasos Mantsavinos wrote in black pen on the margins of one of his drawings. At the top of the white page, the date “October 2021” as a heading, and in the left corner the day of the week “Thursday”.

“I don’t reread my notes next to my drawings, I write what I think at the time,” the artist says as we briefly stop our tour of his solo exhibition, which recently opened at the Byzantine Christian Museum (BKM). I move closer to a display case with a series of black-and-white drawings and try to read the small letters that look like scribbles. They are misspelled and illegible precisely because he himself does not want anyone to read him.

Process Evidence

Inscriptions – memories, comments about his mood, about the weather or about the time, as well as traces of everyday life left on paper, a ring, two inappropriate pencils, a stain from a coffee cup, a drop of water, all this is evidence of a creative process that is deeply experienced for him deed. Freedom of line, richness and dampness of colors, the frenzy of inspiration that refuses to obey any rules except estrus, a variety of expressive means; drawings, constructions, acrylic painting on canvas and wood, these are the elements that make up his peculiar idiom.

The exhibition “The Byzantine World of Thassos Mantsavinos”, as rightly noted by BCM director, archaeologist Pari Kalamaras, provides the public with an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with “one of the aspects of modern Greek artistic creativity, which consciously draws on and feeds on the Byzantine past, in fact, how it is revived and transformed into time.” At the same time, however, it is an open invitation from the artist to the viewer to follow him on an adventure of artistic expression, on a path that has clear glades but also dark waters.

The work of an artist is a living thing. The work you think you control actually has a life of its own.

Art saves us from ourselves, accepts the suffering of our soul and consoles us, as the painter would say. And like a child who breeds secret, imaginary gardens, but always gives the “keys” to his loved ones, he gives us his pictorial vocabulary: pictorial subjects borrowed from Byzantine culture and the tradition of icon painting, linear patterns that are lost. decorative they acquire character and content through repetition, symbols emerging from personal memory such as the temple, house, fish, boat, horse, dragon, tamas and talismans, and encounter our collective unconscious. In the intricate universe of Mantsavinos, “all historical patterns fit and assimilate into a new personal writing: antiquity, Byzantium, shadow theater, Tinian dovecotes, traditional Chian houses,” notes art historian Ioanna Alexandris in the catalog accompanying the exhibition. .

“The work of an artist is a living being,” he says. “The project that you think you control actually has a life of its own. It leaves you loaded with all your heat and intensity but not exhausting. Anything he can say, he will say to the beholder. Time will tell if this will make any difference in the future.”

We enter the exhibition space and it feels like we are crossing time with the artist, with works created from 1997 to the present, and references to when he played with friends in the square near the church as a child. , up to this day. His childhood was full of joys, but it was also marked by death. The loss of his father brought him face to face with mourning from a very young age: “I paint alone and abandoned, an artist without a father, a house without a father… All the houses I paint are the houses I would like to live in.” , He admitted.

“Intense personal experiences are the canvas upon which art appears and sits,” says Mantsavinos, concluding the tour. So, in this picture, in which there is nothing delicate, but which moves, because it is connected with the passions and the sanctity of existence, temples become houses and castles, ships hide a person in their hulls, but also Dionysus defeating pirates, snakes. mean danger, and hearts hide sins.

“The Byzantine peace of Thassos Mantsavinos” will last until January 12. His solo exhibition “The Crypt” opens tomorrow at the Skoufa Gallery.