"A Wonderful New World"

15/02/2007

SOCRATES. –It is therefore logical to consider that the creations of man are made, either in relation to his body – and this is the principle called benefit -, or in relation to his soul - and this we seek with the name beauty. On the other hand, however, one who constructs or creates, having to deal with the rest of the world and with the creative movements which forever seek to destroy or to overturn what he makes, is forced to recognise a third principle, that attempts to transmit his works, and expresses the resistance he seeks them to their destined fate, which is destruction. He thus seeks stability and duration.
PHAIDROS. –These truly are the great earmarks of the perfect work.
Paul Valery, Eupalinos: or The Architect 1

A Wonderful New World
The décor unbalanced
Drawn by a drunkard master
With a ridiculous nose
Standing on a single leg
It was there, as if built
With shimmering chalk
A city upright
As a crane
G. Skarimbas

Directly opposite the butchered structure by Takis Zenetos – the former FIX factory and now the promising building site for the National Museum of Contemporary Art – is the beginning of Irakleous Street. It heads steeply uphill and penetrates surprisingly into the interior of Neos Kosmos. This is the road where Nikos Moschos lives and works. Surrounded by a neighbourhood on the cusp of being regenerated,

with countless potholes and non-existing parking space, myriad badly built houses and accumulated upward extensions, tumbledown neo-classical buildings or humble little houses from the nineteen fifties, with sagging ruins where parasitic flowers sprout riotously on a handful of dirt.
"This area is constantly being deconstructed and reconstructed, and this piques my interest, gets me going", Moschos explains, as we climb the stairs in the dark entrance to the block of flats. "My works are composed from these ruins, the very ones you see walking around the city. I was impelled to record such buildings, to imprint images of them being torn down, of extensions built without permits and of doubtful on-site beautification; perhaps because I was raised in a village. I grew up in Knossos, where all was calm. Naturally there are badly built buildings in Herakleio, you do receive images such as these there as well, you can't avoid them. However, there I always knew that I would return home and my gaze would relax, it would rest on a row of trees or a Minoan column. Here, I can't stop encountering monsters, some in the vicinity of my house, others in the city centre. While in the beginning this gave me a feeling of malaise, now all these were transmuted into technical amenities, into motifs. During the day these dying carcasses of buildings and aerials now constitute my easy source of food, and I keep taking notes, jotting things down with my pencil or using a camera. By night I sit in the dark on my balcony, and watch the bright windows, absorbing already the atmosphere I want to preserve in my works".

In the unexpectedly mature works of his first solo exhibition, Moschos creates a paradoxically alluring wheezing world with a dense plot, where the heroes are intercalated between urban buildings that are in a state of dilapidated collapse, seeking desperate means of communication with each other or with their suffocatingly overbuilt environment. The deliberate misspellings of street signs or the symbolic shattering of a television taking place in one of the works, refer to the desire to crush the image of perfection: nothing in this transcription of this ready-to-be-torn-down urban web of palimpsest compositions, rubbish and shards, of unexpectedly wide-angled visual escapes, of multiply intersecting axes, appears superfluous. The breakdown of the city, the locus of collective memory 2; the fragmentary cinematic takes of narrative; the threatening arms of the excavating machines in the bulldozer process 3, which tears down the past at a rapid rate; the warped masks and the illicit actions of the principals in his images, enter your gaze prismatically, transforming your view into a chaotic kaleidoscope, carrying out irrevocable actions, infinitesimal dialogues. The landscapes of Moschos are populated with forms that imply night time adventures in the city, secret conversations between passing strangers, momentary encounters with the artist’s friends and dear ones, who change residences to a different sphere and are re-sculpted in a soft material, mutating into portraits of the bizarre. Works such as "Restoration" start off with basic axes, upon which are carved imaginary explosive Xs, which suddenly burst outwards, in a way vaguely reminiscent of the violent drawing of a Flemish Descent from the Cross. However the painting is never subject to the literary background of the work, even when that constitutes its starting point. The theme is often conjugated with its structures, runs in parallel with them; oftentimes the works commence from shapes, stories develop along with the composition, are intersected by imaginary diggers who symbolise the idea of deconstruction, but which have been put out of operation in advance. Perhaps in the end the Gosgrove & Daniels view dominates in these self-abrogating works. According to them, the post-modern landscape "appears less like a palimpsest whose ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ meanings are based on correct techniques, theories or ideologies, and more like an electronic text whose meanings can be created, expanded, altered, refined and finally obliterated with a simple pressing of a key" 4.
The exact starting point escapes even Moschos. These works did not commence with the idea of a unit. Many pre-existed as concepts, without having even been executed as drawings. In certain instances notes from his previous work insinuate themselves, as memories of proper portraits or still lives. Offhand works - those which mainly feed his ambition, as he explained to me - drawings which followed as their offshoots, did not commence with specific requirements, instead they sort of occurred at unguarded moments, at some point attaining the borders of composition. From these a world leaps off that exists to a very great extent out there, one we see on a daily basis. If they are depicted with a wilful absurdity, Moschos concludes, it is because in a certain sense he himself is "attempting to make invisible things visible" through painting.
For example, to render visible the modern tolerance for that in earlier days was hidden in the humble regions of the town, such as Psyrri, "warehouses, ironworks, steam-run factories, slaughterhouses, livestock pens" lest they "make the city ugly, or irritate the eyes, noses or ears of its citizens" 5. To render visible the timeless "beautiful, terrible and austere landscape" described in "The Field and the Cemetery", the poem by Constantinos Karyotakis. The "unfinished painting" in the poem’s subtitle, the oil painting found wanting due to the absence of classical ruins and political violence found in the "the oil painting of a great master" in the field of which words such as beautiful and terrible, cancel each other out due to their close proximity. The "beautiful, terrible and austere landscape" which is rendered complete as an "invention of the internal identity of a place, multiply charged both with the coordinates of the subject’s own soul and from the context of the story", rendered complete as "the result of the constant reforming of the organic life it contains" 6.
To render the city’s fiction visible, where "spaces are utilised and re-signposted or reinterpreted", where "spaces are appropriated in a way that works with the assistance of being recalled, where the place, through the memories it bears as a place experienced becomes the carrier of an experience" 7. To render fictional activity visible, activity through which "real space and time is pushed to the side and the player – the building’s reader – enters a partly enclosed place" 8, seeking through this, according to Heidegger "to preserve the thought and the action of those who built it, safeguarding a trace of the era that created it, bridging, in this manner, the sense of space with the idea of man, history with memory".
This city where everything is marked "urgent", founded on the "continuous and swift, instantaneous in certain instances transformations, on interventions or flashy interventions" 9, is inhabited by acquaintances and strangers; art collectors and curators studiously camouflaged; relatives, friends and colleagues of a similar age, such as Savvas, Stelios and Panagiotis, who have also been turned into the artist’s theme obsessions, as he makes a habit of drawing them from memory. In his recent book "Pes, pou einai i Athina" (Tell me where is Athens), Zissis Kotionis sought the history of the soil, the topology of where: he refers the readers he is guiding through his town to Heidegger, to where he notes that "the city’s outline defines a place of freedom, because the city is a multitude", and "each decision by each inhabitant attempting to define his own fate in the city, contains the vague outline of the spectrum of a fence to define a liberty, the close embrace of what is open with something that is closed, a fact that renders the decision of the political inhabitant a tragic decision": This precise coexistence of open and closed is faintly visible in the intentions of those inhabiting the works of Moschos, the young players who with the displacement of their bodies and the reverberations of their exchanges, confirm that "architecture without the existence of the human body is an indifferent material functional morpheme, just like soil, which without the understanding of a breathing body, is an apathetic material substrate" 10.
In Moschos’s painting, if the central axis revolves around the environment, a second one provides an endoscopic examination of the relationships of people living within that environment. Their depictions commenced as meetings with familiar faces in the framework of group portraits, but in the course of events these were transubstantiated into stories, with heroes reappearing time and again, symbolising something more than their private self, proclaiming their place of residence in accordance with the quote from Heracleitus "ethos is the daemon of man", "man’s (usual) abode is the open field, where god (the un-usual) comes into being" 11. In amongst the heroes Moschos paints, there is a repetitive figure that id altered to the degree of the current external image of things: having initially dominated the town, he is suddenly torn off his pedestal. His public image torn down, he turns to "Flight", but may, however, return, when all has been forgotten, due to the capacity of men to be selectively hypocritical. In the piece "A sunny day at the playground", which came about from the images of a pamphlet from some quasi-religious group, a happy family is carrying out its Sunday country excursion in a landscape defined by smokestacks and pipes, vividly reminiscent of the Country House utopia and the compulsory consequence of creating Coal city – terms coined by Lewis Mumford in 1922 – to describe the compulsory dependence of the place where the fruits of labour are enjoyed and the place where labour is carried out 12. In the work of Moschos, the known/unknown defiler of the classical dogma of physical beauty is once more made to flee.
"The themes of the images I create are perhaps occasionally reminiscent of certain moralistic paintings" Moschos observes. "I like to construct images that are apparently innocent but which, in the manner in which they are made, represent and at the same time criticise certain political, social or everyday events that may pass unobserved, but are, however, of definitive importance for fermenting a certain social code of ethics and morals". Back in 1903 Georg Simmel in the essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life", had already attempted to expand the structure and codes of the new point of his town, the metropolis. With shades of Baudelaire, "the observer of urban solitude" hovering over the text, Simmel attempted "an investigation of the cultural body", that "must seek to resolve the equation that complexes such as a metropolis establish within the individual and the supra-individual contents of life"… In a metropolis, an authentic branch of civilisation that exceeds every personal existence, we encounter buildings and educational institutions, miracles and comforts of a technology which is constantly gaining ground, until "in the formations of community life and the visible institutions of the state there appears such a cataclysmic plenitude of crystallised and de-personalised spirit that personality cannot be maintained under its pressure", despite the fact that it receives stimuli, interests, uses for its time and consciousness from all sides. "The atrophy of individual civilisation which is brought about by the hypertrophy of objective civilisation", concludes Simmel, "is one of the reasons for the bitter hatred borne by the heralds of the most extreme individualism, who include Nietzsche, for the metropolis. But at the same time, it is also one of the reasons for which these heralds are so beloved in the metropolis and appear in the eyes of the man of the metropolis as prophets and redeemers of their most irredeemable desires" 13.
Even though the herald with the dimensions of a demigod, who with inconceivable ease is transformed into a scapegoat for a specific social system, to the top of which he may once more claw his way, haunts this first attempt by Moschos, topics such as use of authoritarianism means to shape character in education or domination in love, also consume the artist. Let us say that a certain criticism about the rules and situations that bear the title, shape a child properly, while essentially they are derived and asserted from a deep well of personal insecurity in the more old. The title "This is why", an order as well as an admonition, exhorts us to bend over and embrace the wants of a small child, shrinking under the threat of the gaze or the thumb of a bloated adult relative. Who truly knows what is right? According to Moschos, excessive authoritarian behaviour in the adult contains a strong dose of insecurity. The books of depth, instruments of order and sources of wisdom, are worked in as motifs, just like roof tiles are elsewhere, and tilt dangerously on the shelves of the bookcase, proposing a resistance to disorder. Elsewhere, the image of a large sized musical instrument with placating sound (a violin), coexists with the neurotic fingers of its player. In "Romeo and Juliet" Moschos tries his hand at the familiar and the unfamiliar aspects of love, where he is once more preoccupied by issues of possession and freedom, boundaries and acceptance, emotional systems which are surely derived from the very environment which involves the sum of his oeuvre.
And yet, this very unity of successive dependencies and commitments, the pressured place of residence and social lies, is defused with a different work, shortly before it reaches termination. In this, Moschos, almost without comprehending it, has recorded, without models, photographs, or any other form of aide, an exceptionally daring and complex composition: a specific evening of emotional anarchy, the frenetic end of a party with friends, where all the senses were tested without limits. Smoke, alcohol, music, vulgar jokes and sexual innuendos, coexist in this work, which in my opinion functions as an explosive and optimistic antidote to the apparently one-way street in asphyxiating environment of all the previous works. The same optimism, however, also inhabits another work, much quieter and also personal work: background music possibly by Bach, Chopin or the Hungarian Symphony by Liszt, which often is used by Moschos as an exercise in adding or subtracting elements, brought about the definitely more light-filled work of this group. In the "Party" and in "At Uncle Gustav’s house", where the healing commences after the end of the world, friendship and love prove stronger than the system.
Several days after our two encounters, Moschos literally bombarded me with phone calls, anxious, I imagine, about what I would finally write: "I believe that discussing the matter exhaustively, we overvalue my intentions and perhaps do not do justice to other causes or motivations that simply constitute painting obsessions". "In most of the works there are certain elements that took place entirely in my mind, despite the fact that intense familiarity with people and events or a photograph constitutes a means of improvement". "I always persist in hoping that the topic and paintability will be married; my works are based on the rules of "good painting" of the grand masters: balanced imagery, studied composition, knowledge of curves, expressive elements that functions as a correct syntax or a vocabulary". "I want you to know that certain forms arose form a pure need to be expressed. This need is what got me going, a pure part of painting, and not a form of social protest". Thank goodness, I think, that this need for pure painting still exists amidst Coal city or even more, as a free commentary on the narrow margins of Country Home.

Iris Criticou
February / March 2007

1. Paul Valery, Eupalinos, or the Architect [Dialogue of the Dead], translated into Greek by Ellie Lambridi, prologue by Angelos Sicelianos, Agra publications (second edition), Athens 2005. 
2. the city as the locus of the collective memory of people in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, ed. L. Papadopoulos, G. Papakostas, G. Tsitiridou, translated into Greek by V. Petridou, Thessaloniki: Synchrona Themata, 1987
3. the term bulldozer process used by Thanassis Moutsopoulos, I Palia Athina pethane. Zito I Nea Athina (I, epitelous giname Metropolis) [Old Athens is dead. Long live the New Athens (Or, at last did we become a Metropolis?)] in the book I metavassi tis Athinas (The transition of Athens), edited by Christina Kalbari / Kostas Daflos, futura publications, Athens 2005
4. Denis Gosgrove and Stephen Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape, (1984), refer to James Corner, ed. Recovering Landscapes. Essays in Contemporary Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999
5. the noisome world which in the 19th century was kept well away from the eyes of the noble residents of Athens, described in "Athinaikoi Peripatoi (Athenian Walks)" by Emm. Rhoides. See Aliki Spyropoulou, Palimpsisti Poli (Palimpsest City), in the publication Mnimi kai Embeiria tou Horou (Memory and Experiencing Space), ed. Stavros Stavrides, Alexandria publications, Athens 2006
6. Kostas Manolides Pros tin endohora: se anazitisi mias syneidisis tou topiou (Towards the hinterlands: in search of the consciousness of a landscape) in the collective volume Oraio, frichto kai aperitto topion anagnoseis kai prooptikes tou topiou stin Ellada (Beautiful, terrible and austere landscape: readings and prospects of landscape in Greece), University of Thessaly, Department of Architectural Engineering, ed. Kostas Manolides, insides publications, 2003. 
7. Katerina Polychroniadi, Mnimi tis kathimerinis embeirias tis polis (Memory of the everyday experience of the city) in the collective volume Mnimi kai Embeiria tou Horo, as above.
8. Nikolaos-Ion Terzoglou, Istoria-mnimi-mnimio (History-memory-monument), as above.
9. the term the city marked "urgent" coined by Nikos Kazeros To gegonos tou "katepeigontos" – I poli tou katepeigontos (The event of the "urgent" – The city of the urgent) in the publication I metavasi tis Athinas, see above
10. Zissis Kotionis, Pes, pou einai i Athina (Tell me, where is Athens), Agra publications, Athens 2006.
11. Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, translated into Greek and with an introduction by G. Xyropaidis, Rhoes publications, Athens, 1987, 2000.
12. In The story of Utopias, Mumford noted: "the Country House is, therefore, the main model on the basis of which the medieval order of things transformed into the modern order of things. Its idol remains prevalent, even when man inhabits the centre of a metropolis. More than at any other time, the Country House today is used to balance out with an abundance of natural goods all that which was lost because of its divorce from the community which upholds it ... The passionate search for natural resources by the Country House gave birth to another institution, Coal City". Lewis Mumford, The story of Utopias, translated into Greek by Vassilis Tomanas, Nisides, 1998. 
13. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, translated into Greek by Gerassimos Lykiardopoulos, Erasmos (The Ideas series), Athens, 1993

Text by Iris Kritikou on the occassion of the exhibition of Nikos Moschos held at Ekfrasi-Gianna Grammatopoulos Gallery, 2007, Athens