ATHENS Painting

“Floor plans of six temples” The concept is based on Apollonian and Dionysian spirit (the light and the darkness of the human soul) with a new expressionism approach of energetic drawings (mixed media, sizes 20x24cm) and paintings (mixed media, sizes 150x150cm). The drawings are executed with one line or one stroke for the paintings. In essence the project is a painterly experimentation, something similar to what the surrealists Breton and Apollinair had tried the "automatic" writing, ie a psychic automatism, in order to express the unconscious forms a clean-mediators away from any brain processing. The exercise begins with unregulated gestural painting touches in the form of densification of plastic materials and following a choreography transformed into a ritual calligraphic symbols. The ground plans of temples used as a defined geographical area in order to execute the choreography, punctuated with the orientation and scale. The color scale down the frequency of counterpoints and gives rhythm to the choreography, meaningfull the content as Apollonian and Dionysian ritual. Apollonian and Dionysian is a philosophical dichotomy most commonly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. “The further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, just as reproduction depends upon the duality of the sexes.” The Apollonian force is defined by its reliance on reason, order, control, individuality, and sober thought, and seeks to bring philosophic order to the universe. Nietzsche, being most concerned with art in his treatment of the concept, identified the visual arts as embodying an Apollonian force. Modern sciencee with its scientific methodd and methodological naturalism could be seen as an Apollonian force, deriving orderly laws and principles to approximate, as closely as possible, the operation of the universe. The Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, science, and the power of thought, was driven by a decidedly Apollonian philosophy. The Dionysian philosophy is that which embraces mysticism, emotion, chaos, "world harmony," and "collective unity." We will have achieved much for aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the immediately certain apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, just as reproduction depends upon the duality of the sexes, their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation. With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvellous metaphysical act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy, just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art. In order to get closer to these two instinctual drives, let us think of them next as the separate artistic worlds of dreams and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the condition of all plastic art, indeed, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We enjoy the form with an immediate understanding, all shapes speak to us, nothing is indifferent and unnecessary. For all the very intense life of these dream realities, we nevertheless have the thoroughly disagreeable sense of their illusory quality. Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that this reality in which we live and have our being is an illusion, that under it lies hidden a second quite different reality. And Schopenhauer specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms or dream pictures. Constantinos Daldakis