Great honor for him Marco Campanicontemporary artist to leave his personal imprint of painting on holy mountainalong with the monumental works of its great creators Byzantine art. Fresco 30 sq.m. at the main entrance of I.M. Vatopediou bears his signature, and a series of large works of his decorate the central halls of the building that houses the political administration of the state of Agios Georgios in curry.

We find the artist in his most productive period. He has just finished frescoing the Vatopedino Monastery and is feverishly preparing for two major exhibitions: a retrospective at the National Library in late 2023 and a second at the Benaki Museum in 2024 with new works based on Homer’s Odyssey. His future projects add to the list of solo and group exhibitions, but some of his most iconic works will forever remain in his rich gallery. State of Atonia.

It is the second monastery in Agios Georgios – after Simonopetra – to commission a secular artist to develop on Mount Athos in a large-scale work his own visual language, free from the constraints of classical traditional iconography. Desire I.M. Vatopediu was supposed to have an introduction to the history of the monastery in visual form from the very beginning, a kind of visual tour for the pilgrim. The panoramic approaches to the thousand-year-old Athos landscape that the artist eventually chose are grafted from the Byzantine tradition, his study of the work of Papaloukas, the artistic sensibility from his long association with the secret world of Athos, but also from Western European art, assimilated during his studies at St. Martin in London.

The central exposition in Vatopedi depicts the entire monastic complex, cells and accessories of the monastery (temples, buildings, warehouses, etc.) on Mount Athos. Other compositions reveal the history of the monastery parts, the shares that the monastery owns today or that the monastery had in the past, in the Greek region, in the Balkans, as well as in Romania, where the presence of the Vatopedi Monastery was once strong.

The history of the entrance began in 2013 and gradually ended last year with the depiction of the litany to the image of the Mother of God, celebrated annually in the monastery. At this time, Marcos Campanis was working directly on the walls set on scaffolding – a painstaking manual exercise, but, in his opinion, gives the result more authenticity and picturesqueness.

His brushwork, like a “painterly drone”, conveys the majesty of the Hagioreita landscape, which invites us on a mental journey through time and place.

In his compositions, earthy colors (waters) elevate the landscape, built and unbuilt, with the simplicity and expressiveness of his writing that also characterizes all his work, with a particularly personal style based on the aesthetic standards of the Byzantine era. but also folk painting has become a modern visual language. Campanis, drawing elements from architectural plans and photographic sources, captures buildings in a realistic yet highly decorative manner. The landscape functions as a “map” with an abstract approach and freedom of movement that allows hagiographic elements to be included.

The same technique was followed by Markos Campanis in the works (acrylic on wood) that he created with the kind sponsorship of Athanasios Martinos for the new building of the political administration of Mount Athos. In the composition “Chersonese”, the painter leaves his personal artistic imprint on the models illustrating the views of Mount Athos, created in the XVIII-XIX centuries either in paintings or in the form of wall paintings, lithographs or engravings.

In the second draft of the administration, he figuratively depicts the capital of the Monastic State in a panoramic abstract composition. In the triptych, the topography of Caria is developed with images of the foundations of the Athos state, symbolizing the administrative power exercised in the region of Mount Athos.

A project with a similar concept was preceded by I.M. Simonos Petras, where Markos Campanis designed in 1996 the topography that adorns the wooden ceilings of the synactic and other rooms of the monastery.

I look at his pictorial compositions – in photographs, of course – and “fly” over Mount Athos, over Karei, over the Holy Vatopedi Monastery. I “travel” around the Athos state by land and sea, through monasteries and hermitages, through the narrow streets of the capital Agioreita among twenty monasteries, through the inner part of the Vatopaidin complex. His brushwork, like a “picturesque drone”, conveys the majesty of the Hagioreita landscape, which invites us on a mental journey through time and space. A route that simultaneously opens all the creative paths of Markos Campanis, from his first solo exhibition in Athens in 1979 to the present day. The simple, deeply spiritual works introduce us to the holy place and instill in us, as Nikos Vatopoulos wrote in a catalog of Campanis’ earlier works, “the divine simplicity of Kallus and Harmonia. It’s a whispered prayer.”