MARINA LAMBRAKI PLAKA | November 2016
Professor Emeritus of Art History
Director of the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutzos Museum
Savas Georgiadis’ images are ineffaceably imprinted in memory. Even in his first appearance in the Athens Art Gallery in 2002, he managed to captivate our attention. The memorable and beloved Marilena Liakopoulou, with her eyesight experienced in good painting since her childhood, could not remain indifferent in the face of this “unscrupulous” talent. I weigh the word: “unscrupulous”, because right from the start he dared to measure himself up against the greatest challenge: portrait, the higher genre of painting, according to the theoretical texts of the Renaissance. The field is actually a mine-field of unsurpassed models, especially when the artist chooses a form of realism, as Savas Georgiadis has. Is realism in painting actually possible and accepted today, I wonder. Yes, I would readily reply, provided we accept what is considered a self-evident fact by the modern psychology of perception: the human gaze and the images it accumulates are not a mirage of the world, but rather cultural products. If the spirit of the artist remains open and vigilant to whatever happens around him, then the realism he proposes can be not only original but revealing as well. That is exactly the case with the gaze and painting of Savas Georgiadis.
It is obvious that the young artist explores at first his faces with the aid of the photographic lens. Of course, he is neither the first nor the last artist who is enchanted by the other way of looking at things that the lens suggests. Ever since its invention, this new means that artificially captures reality has been inspiring artists: artists like Delacroix, Courbet and later Manet were inspired some of their most “painterly” rendered works from actual photographs. It is common knowledge, moreover, that in the 20th century photography played a leading role in movements like Pop art or Photorealism (Hyperrealism).
Savas Georgiadis has elaborated his own privileged relation with photography. The lens identifies with the gaze of the artist, is immersed in faces, youthful and female in general, with abyssal close ups and sometimes deforming interventions. The painstaking process of pictorial transformation then follows. The photographic image, the thanatography, as Roland Barthes calls it, owes, with the aid of the pictorial alchemy, to be transmuted, moving from the instantané of the photographic snap-shot towards the condensation of time, the duration, that constitutes the holy of holies of true artistic creation. What enables this crucial leap is, not only the artistic perfection, but also the deeper expressional goal of this destination. What does the artist seek in these outsize female faces that stare at us through his paintings with such mesmerizing clarity? His paintings depict young, modern women, young girls, with explosively vibrant vitality and pinkish complexion, that the experienced brush of Georgiadis knows how to transform into palpable verisimilitude.
The young artist attained his profound knowledge of the laws of painting thanks to his prolific apprenticeship next to the brilliant and charismatic Teacher, Dimitris Mytaras and he never ceases to practice it incessantly on the great “kinsmen” creators, of earlier and later times, from Greco to Velázquez, from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon. At that particular time period (1970-1990), the return to figurative painting was favored not only by the international circumstance but also the presence of great teachers at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Their students, the generation of the ’80s and ’90s, rejuvenated in a dynamic and modern way the time-old tradition of representational art in our country.
However, a more meticulous perusal of the artist’s painting, apart from the impression caused by his rare artistic perfection, reveals to us its rich stochastic character. The allure of youth, the brilliant gaze, the awkward narcissism of makeup, overstressed for expressive reasons, fail to conceal the real intention of the painter: to unlock the personality of the model, the anxieties, the queries and the questions that exist in a hidden, dormant and repressed form behind the apparent exaggeration of life. An elusive melancholy permeates the sensitive young faces, a melancholy that seems to signal the end of their innocence. It is obvious that Savas does not choose his models at random. His works express respect, love and admiration toward the female sex and a dedication to beauty uncommon to the art of our time. Georgiadis’ female faces inundate the canvas threatening to breach its boundaries, as if they desperately strive to escape from the painting surface, thus annihilating their solitude. Both the painter and his models suggest their severe urge to communicate with the viewer. And indeed, the heroines of everyday life starring in the paintings of Savas Georgiadis are so forcefully imprinted in the memory of the viewer that become the familiar and eternal tenants of his imaginary museum, thus fulfilling, not only the painter’s wish, but also one of the oldest goals of art.