PAINTINGS REPRESENTING PAINTINGS

What you is what you see
Frank Stella

What you see is not what you see
Dimitris Anastasiou

When Dimitris Anastasiou invited me to his studio to see the section “Paintings representing paintings” that he was going to present at Kaplanon 5, the truth is that at first I felt embarrassed. Entering a room of about 20 square meters, I was confronted with a chaos equivalent of a Bacon’s studio. My embarrassment did not, however, come from the clutter of the room, but from the fact that I could not locate the work in question. There were two easels in the small room, on which were a portrait and an interior,a work I already knew. Looking around the four narrow walls I noticed that there were innumerable objects, two chalkboards, two pieces of cork, one with photographs, postcards and notes, the other with a painting pinned on it which in no way resembled the familiar way Anastasiou painted, pencil drawings, photocopies of well-known works of art from the centuries, his older works and numerous crates waiting for someone to get them out of detention. I assumed, therefore, that Anastasiou had not taken the trouble to set up his work so that I could see it, even though I had pointed out that I had some time to spare.

I sat down, somewhat irritated, in the armchair that was in the middle of the room and asked him to present the work he had spoken to me about. He replied that the unity crates were in front of me. I looked again and spotted a perfunctory copy of a Freud painting and a torn blue painting – a copy of a Fontana, a self-portrait in the style of Van Eyck, and a badly painted landscape framed by a heavy frame. These four paintings were obviously copies or at least transcriptions of paintings, and I asked him if these constituted the “unity” he had told me about. If the section “Paintings representing paintings” were just copies of known paintings, I was obviously wasting my valuable time. He replied “yes, except for the Freud copy”.

I was prepared to tell him that it would be better to go back to the work he had been doing for years (his interiors and portraits had at least some value) and not waste his time with nonsense. I got up nonetheless, determined to see them more closely, but then, as my perspective changed towards the electrician’s painting on the wall, I realised that it was suspiciously shallow, realising almost automatically that it was not a real electrician’s painting, but a painting representing an electrician’s painting. Scanning the space more carefully afterwards, I discovered that all the paintings in the section were indeed in front of my eyes. With the assistance of touch, I realised that both the blackboards and cork bulletin-boards and some of the inverted crates were illusory painted paintings, and that the frames that framed some of the paintings were also painted as part of the works they were supposed to frame. I sat back in the chair, reflecting that Anastasiou had set up a game for me, testing my gaze, and therefore my gaze-derived process of identifying things.

It was now obvious that he had played with the word “painting” in order to confuse paintings with electric boards, bulletin boards, schoolroom paintings (blackboards or greenboards), reversed paintings and, in addition, some well-known paintings through their reversal, in order to comment on the artistic production of the last centuries. And he had created an illusively painted section, which with almost every single piece raised some questions in relation to art, its history and philosophy, i.e. questions of the ontology of the work of art. Van Eyck came to mind with his redefinition of pictorial space through the painted frame, the baroque painters who rejected the bazaar definition of the painting as a “window to the world” with their inverted two-dimensional paintings, Marcel Duchamp and the question of the ontology of the work of art through his ready-made, Lucio Fontana’s nerdism, but also the early Andy Warhol of the manufactured detergent cans, who (as Duchamp’s brainchild) had set out to redefine the artistic work and the utilitarian object and had caused their ontological confusion.

I was forced, despite all my objections to the section, to overcome my initial irritation and acknowledge to Anastasiou that he had created something interesting. And I promised him that, in addition to this preface, I would write a critical commentary on his works (I would charge him half price if he bought the preface), on condition that it would be published in the catalogue of the exhibition that would follow.

Tasos Dimitriou
Art critic & art historian

*From the catalogue of the exhibition Paintings Representing Paintings, at Kaplanon 5 gallery, 2009.