“Marginally human”/ Works 2012-2019
A reading of Nikos Moschos’s painting

In October 1966, L’Arc magazine published a long article by Jean-Paul Sartre on Tintoretto’s painting Saint George and the Dragon.1 In this paper the French philosopher’s profound observations turn the ordinary subject of the painting into a tale of adventure. Sartre begins with the painter’s relation with the depicted characters and their actions. It is a multifaceted relation, he claims, and sometimes a hostile one, since the characters here are seen as agents, bearers of a moral principle.

Tintoretto’s composition is dominated by obsession and prejudice, the painter’s predispositions; there are also blind passions such as fears, and acts that occur concurrently. Colour can be a passage: apart from revealing the dominant feeling, it demarcates the painting’s boundaries, e.g. its beginning. And matter may liberate or confine the cha-racters, revealing their intentions and weaknesses. Through colour and matter, the painter regulates time and duration—how long we spend before a fabric, an object, an expression, a gesture.

Indeed, claims Sartre, Robusti knows well how to manipulate our expectations and also how to direct our body to the necessary angle that fits in with the vertical and sickle-shaped cuts he creates in the painting. Nothing is randomly positioned in the composition: there is a secret balance among the figures, each of which suggests something—a force, or even a future action. «His canvases», writes the philosopher, «are covered with signs whose function is to foretell the future of the principal characters and to figure its imminence».2 Moreover, although he has no knowledge of science, the painter conveys inertia in a unique way: «on his canvas he depicts death, fear, life as inert appearances».3 Most importantly, according to Sartre, in his painting Tintoretto charts an itinerary that test the perceptiveness of the viewers who are called upon to identify the stops proposed stopovers or chart one or more of their own courses in their mind. As he notes, «Robusti’s itinerary conducts us through a complex play of deceptions: each presence points to the next, and is disqualified by it. […] The painter’s message is clear: everything on his canvas is taking place at once. He encloses everything in the unity of a single instant».4 Further on we come across an observation with Marxist overtones: Tintoretto’s tastes were plebeian, hence in the philosopher’s eyes «George is a workman driving in a nail».5 Sartre goes on to opine that Tintoretto is the epic painter of solitude. Thus the mirage of the walls of the depicted city, with their vertiginous verticality, points to the present absence of Godot, the enigmatic hero of Samuel Beckett.6 Ultimately, this turmoil—with its conflict-like traits—that informs the painting of Tintoretto leads to the following thought: «All of us are born in exile. This, again, is what he attempted to depict in his St George».7

Sartre’s insights may not come from an art historian, but they are useful to the lovers and students of good painting; even more so when this painting traces its roots to the works of Tintoretto.

Nikos Moschos grew up (in Herakleion, Crete) with Jacopo over his bed. The imagina-tive painting of the celebrated Venetian artist fascinated and taught him what art is and what it can do: it was, in other words, love at first sight, and shaped his aesthe- tic perception. As far as his technical training was concerned, copying played a key role. As we know, in the early stages of learning one’s initiation to the formal capacity of the medium takes place through copying landscapes, people, animals, objects as well as the artworks displayed in museums or published in books and magazines. Young Nikos would spend long hours drawing copies of works by Tintoretto (and other old masters he found in the library of his father, Takis Moschos, who gave his son his first painting lessons), so as to learn the secrets of their creation; to understand how an image is made and how it functions. And when the aspiring artist turned twelve, his sleep ceased to be merely restless as a hitherto remote dream came true: he travelled with his father to Venice and got to admire in the flesh the works of his favourite painter.

Studying in depth Tintoretto, El Greco, Michael Damaskinos, Zurbarán and the major Old Masters, Nikos Moschos learned the «physiology» of painting: this included chiaroscuro, perspective (foreshortening), conveying the elasticity of the flesh, and how colour can be used to structure the painting and establish a rhythm in it. After mastering the necessary techniques (with his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts greatly contributing to this), he had to create an imagery that would carry his personal seal and reflect his own time. Yet what subjects could convey «a visual world at overspeed» like that of the 21st century? What images does a contemporary painter select to express a world saturated with images? Above all, what painting would show respect to that of his predecessors and stand convincingly next to it?

Having studied also the great painters of the 20th century —delving specifically into the rendering of the human figure by Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning but also into the iconoclastic idiom of contemporary comics— Moschos realised that painting is primarily a way of living.8 He was also quick to understand the maxim of «like cures like». So if he were to render not one but several realities (that is, a reality structured in many layers, like the one we have been experiencing in recent decades), he would adopt a homeopathic approach to painting.

The six paintings he presented in his solo exhibition at the Xippas Gallery in 2012 confirm this hypothesis in the clearest and most unequivocal way. If we were to compile a glossary to convey the aesthetic and the feeling exuded by the works of Moschos, the most representative words would be «amalgam», «alloy», «concoction», «hoard», «hopper». There is, in short, a pronounced accumulation-mixture-distortion of objects, bodies and spaces; there is strong anger, outburst and paroxysm, vertigo and adrenalin, detonation and eruption of feelings. One only needs to stand before the largest work in the show and the only one with a title—an ironic-sounding title at that: Happy birthday to Me. In the centre of the painting we can see two or perhaps three doctors performing surgery on a shapeless mass of metal parts and human limbs: it is unclear whether they are trying to separate or put them together. The composition, in which the painter intertwines flesh and machine with decisive precision, is not without grimaces of pain, gestures of despair and ectoplasms. Directly beneath this complex, a gaping chasm seems ready to swallow all those involved in this fatal encounter. As the title suggests, the person directly involved here is the artist himself and his shaky mental state. If this is indeed a festive day, it does not merely trigger mixed feelings: it has evolved into a nightmare.

The striking thing about this body-horror painting is undoubtedly the artist’s daring, who is able to convey a moment of agony with the necessary detachment, with the same cool sobriety of the surgeons depicted at work. Indeed, in the paintings of Moschos the forms clash without falling apart and vanishing, without resorting to facile expressionism or ostentatious photorealism: this fine balance between order and chaos, which recalls the «secret balance» in Jacopo’s works, reveals the dynamic of Moschos’s painting and his capacity to cleverly remix elements from art history, pop culture and the cinema.

Of course, it is not just his psychological state that Moschos conveys in his densely populated compositions. His painting —a painting «at boiling point»— poses philosophical questions on violence, humanism, coexistence. The clash of forms in his paintings is directly associated with the concept of post-humanism, i.e. translated as a philosophical conflict about the future of man, specifically about «man’s evolution through the influence of genetics, technology and implants».9 With his painting, Moschos seems to be asking «Are You a Transhuman?», at the same time inviting viewers to reflect on a crucial issue that preoccupies scientists, philosophers and other artists.10 Indeed, who can deny that humanism has long ceased to be? As philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote already two decades back, in 1999: «Through the media’s establishment of mass culture in the developed world after 1918 (radio broadcasting) and after 1945 (television), and even more through current revolutions in how people are connected, human coexistence in societies today has been put on new foundations. These, as it is easy to show, are decidedly post- literary, post-epistolographic, and consequently post-humanist. Whoever takes the prefix ‘post’ in these formulations to be too dramatic can replace it with the adverb ‘marginally’ […]».11

A quick glance at the art of Nikos Moschos is enough for one to conclude that the artist is aware of the shortcomings of humanism (after all, the starting point of this critique is dehumanisation) and sees man as an endangered species. Let us see in more detail exactly is this marginal, post-human condition expressed in his work.

Starting with his works from 2012-2015, we observe in the centre of each painting a solid mass like a core about to explode or like a huge magnet which has gathered all manner of disparate elements. This mass comes like a punch in the stomach and the gaze. It may seem still and inert, but this is probably a momentary pause: more accurately, it looks like a clenched fist shortly before it punches the viewer in the face. For example, the painting But it’s obvious of 2013 (the year the artist begins to give titles to his works, incidentally) presents the classic theme of a horseman in an unusual way. This faceless «Jockey of hell or of spectacle», as we might call him, has a dynamism and a grace worthy of an ancient Greek statue. Amidst the chaos of the image, something ethereal emerges: the wheel, the head, the mouth and the soundless cry form a hovering mass like a blossoming flower. On the other hand, in Jack knows… (2013) the figures are more and are shown to be crammed in some seemingly confined space—a city bus or a train. Their facial features are visible, precisely in order to convey their displeasure or the apathy that this coexistence produces. The artist depicts this symbiosis as scary and impossible, as a setting of cannibalism or, perhaps, paranoia, as if these passengers—like most of those who inhabit his paintings—were inmates of a mental hospital. Moreover, the title of the work echoes the scene from Kubrick’s movie The Shining where the insane writer (Jack Nicholson) utters his famous “Here’s Johnny!”, with that creepy smile that was to become history.

To go back to Sartre, in these works Moschos proves to be an eccentric builder: an un-orthodox worker who tears down and builds, time and again, until he is happy with the outcome. In Tonight I’m gonna have a restless sleep and Tomorrow is too late (both from 2013), the artist uses the element of time (a prediction about today and a pessimistic view of tomorrow, respectively) to convey his post-humanist vision. Here the all-conquering, all-levelling and all-equalising time automatically determines the painted space as well. This space may change in each composition but its main properties remain the same: the disjointedness, the transmutation of bodies and the explosive merging of people, machines and bodies are among the things that characterise it.

In Portrait of an Intellectual (2013), Solidarity (2013) and Me vs The Blob - A safe fight (2014) there is a common denominator: an armchair as the site of the battle of the depicted subject, in this case the artist, against his demons.12 Confronting the indivisible mass with something stable and variously signified (this piece of furniture symbolises listlessness, rest, reflection, television viewing but also the taking-sown of a patient’s medical history) makes the «languishing» in an armchair even more pronounced. The «safe fight» between the painter and The Blob (a clear reference to American B-movies) acquires epic dimensions and suggests a self-sarcastic mood. Indeed, as Moschos confirms in an interview, after 2013 he introduced black humour in his works.

Aside from humour, it is evident that after 2013 Moschos’s paintings possess a broader and more vibrant range of colours. What still lingers, however, is the transubstantiation of the inner gloom, the inner spectres and perhaps a certain anathema (call it displeasure, indignation, criticism).13 And so does the question: «What exactly is going on here?» Ultimately, what you cannot dispute when seeing his works is the affinity with Tintoretto’s universe. There is action, narrative, tension and dynamism in both of them: in short, your gaze gets involved in an adventure. And the similarities do not stop at that: their paintings fuse together persons and objects, all the figures are inscribed in an architectural scenario, they both create compositions where space collapses and falls to pieces. Their images are complex, sophisticated, hard to read and classify. Finally, they are interested in time and duration, in how the moment includes the viewer. Writing about St George, Sartre speaks of a time trap into which we fall, of our encounter with a false present, of a peculiar kind of memory symbolised by the resting corpse in the painting — a memory that is «prolonged, […] forever identical, useless».14

Moschos himself describes the meaning of his work better than anyone else. In a dense statement on his works of 2014-2015, he reveals all that one would wish to know about his «painterly constructions [...] born out of fatal conflicts».15 The artist attributes the fragmentary aspect of his forms to time, «before which everything is equalised». He notes also that his images look like human monuments stripped of everything noble or sublime». The painter’s denunciation of an insecure homo violens becomes tangible in such powerful compositions as I heard a noise in the back yard while I was watching TV (2014), The last bastion (2014), The silent cliff (2014), The Great White Thief (2015) and You are already in the party (2015). In all these works none of the figures is complete, memory appears fossilised and mutilation is omnipresent. This morphological violence reflects a specific aesthetic that «demonstrates the antiterrorist vision of art».16 This is an iconoclastic aesthetic with a long history and tradition, especially in 20th-century art. As Roger Dadoun argues, the dismantling of the forms is actually a battle against order. Consummate forms, writes Dadoun, «exert some kind of violence in that it imposes some “order” – even if it is an order meant to repulse the violence exerted by disorder and the amorphous».17 This means that the post-human, hybrid and monstrous body in the paintings of Moschos has a liberating effect: it is a non-compliant body open to interpretations—a body that defies social norms.18

In his text for the «Inevitable Nature» series of 2016, Moschos repeats something he had stressed again in 2014: «cause and effect coexist in the same image».19 He follows this observation, which brings to mind one of Sartre’s thoughts on the Tintoretto painting («everything on his canvas is taking place at once»), with another: «The mixture of disparate elements—such as rocks, machines and a layer of whipped cream, for instance—is a form of commentary on cultural evolution and the constant relationship of survival and organisation in the environment». The certain thing is that in the eight paintings in this series Moschos does not stop at commenting on man’s violence against the environment and the destruction of nature as a result of human intervention, such as the endless and chaotic spread of cities or the hideous buildings that sprout like mushrooms everywhere: in our view, the artist makes a deeper comment of the term «landscape», stressing its innate ambiguity.20 Moreover, knowing that the landscapes of 17th-century Dutch painters were associated with the national identity, one may reasonably wonder whether the monumental, anti-naturalist, unreal, futuristic landscapes conceived by Moschos’s imagination are telling us something about Greece in this time of crisis. Although the artist hastens to assure us that his landscapes «do not depict any particular time or place», the «Inevitable Nature» series could be seen as an allegorical tale for a land and a people who experienced the joy of reconstruction and the nightmare of collapse. Of course, to heed the artist’s assurance, the opposite may well be true and his landscapes may contain no story at all. In fact, as it is true of the sight of ruins, what we realise as we look at these eight landscapes is our incapacity to understand history as specific, dated and experienced.21

After «Inevitable Nature», Moschos went back to processing the human figure, in a different way this time. The solid mass that dominated the centre in most paintings is now absent or broken down. Crushing remains strongly present, but now it is accompanied by whole images and simulacra. In works like Tarzan, wake up!!! (2017) and It’s getting better (2017) the cinematic references are obvious, yet one soon realises that the painter does not stop at mere allusions. Instead, he goes one step further and acts as director, dividing his compositions into several episodes-sequences.22 This establishes a path that directs the viewer’s gaze to specific figures and events. The relation of these works with the cinematic idiom becomes clearer if one considers some early masterpieces of this medium, such as Germaine Dulac's movie The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) on a scenario by Antonin Artaud. The sequence with the dissected head or the oversized eye incorporated in the landscape (using a double exposure effect) convey the same poetic paroxysm one finds also in Moschos’s painterly film constructions.

In the book Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Freud contends that «Man has become a kind of prosthetic God».23 According to art historian Hal Foster, this phrase conveys like no other the stress, the sense of loss, the narcissistic traumas and the phallic fantasies of many modernist artists.24 The works of Moschos reflect a displeasure towards the post-humanist culture and man’s insatiable desire for transformation and evolution. In Every single Tlazolteotl (2018) an aged man, a small prosthetic god, appears from between the legs of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl. The landscape to the left of the deity is idyllic: an enchanting sunset is included in the scene, both literally and meta-phorically. Outside it, the advancing night reveals an anachronism. As suggested by the tent—which alludes to the painting The Dream of Constantine (1464) of Piero della Francesca—we stand before a miracle, a revelation. The goddess of fertility and of purification from everything that is dirty and sick gives life to a man who is mature, resourceful yet incapable of uttering speech.

The collage culture reigns supreme in FTW (2018) as well. The enigmatic title suits admirably the contents of the image: Moschos here reverses WTF, the acronym for a well-known exclamation of surprise or incredulity when something has shocked us. The artist’s message to himself, and perhaps to the viewer of his works, appears to be: don’t waste precious time in unproductive thoughts and trivialities. Ignore any questions that block you emotionally and look at the essence, the truth of things. The two central figures—let us call them human—interact between them in some way. On the left, a man in a strange, sculptural posture is holding a set of dentures in his right hand (Moschos revealed to us that he is a real person, a dental technician who lives near the artist’s studio in Neos Kosmos). His left eye is behind a diagnostic loupe, and his right hand is touching the face of his «patient»: an oversize effigy of the well-known American politician Joe Biden. We cannot tell whether the technician has just removed Biden’s dentures, thus preventing him from speaking, or is about to stick it in the gaping mouth of this dragon who incarnates the «empty word». In one sense, one might seek analogies, differences and similarities with James Rosenquist's painting President Elect (1960-61/1964), where the painter copies a portrait of JFK and sets it again other disparate elements. Still, the intentions and sensibility of Moschos are far removed from those of the exponents of Pop Art. In the right-hand side of FTW, on another level and after the gaze has crossed some transverse anatomical cuts, there is a prostrate humanlike being blocking a forest lane. Strangely enough, the resting posture of this corpse reminds us of something. There may be a strange kind of «prolonged and useless» memory underlying all this, like the one that Sartre recognised in Tintoretto’s St George. In any case, the French philosopher opened our eyes and, as it transpires, indicates the conclusions from the reading we attempted here. Aside from a way of living, painting is an ethical activity; and the works of Nikos Moschos—works which demonstrate that our relationship with the world is anything from difficult to insufferable25—convince us that the artist is passionately devoted to this notion.

Christopher Marinos

1 Sartre had published one more article on Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto in 1957; see «Le Séquestré de Venise», Les Temps Modernes (no. 141, November). Interestingly, the title of the painting, which is at London’s National Gallery, is different in Greek: Saint George Killing the Dragon (c. 1555).
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, «Saint George and the Dragon», in Between Existentialism and Marxism, translated by John Matthews, Verso, London-New York 2008, p. 181.
3 Ibid., p. 182.
4 Ibid., p. 182.
5 Ibid., p. 184.
6 Ibid., p. 186.
7 Ibid., p. 189.
8 The phrase «Painting is a way of living» comes from Willem de Kooning.
9 See, for instance, the article «Μετανθρωπισμός: Η φιλοσοφική σύγκρουση για το μέλλον του ανθρώπου», Kathimerini, 13 Aug. 2013, available on http://www.kathimerini.gr/49998/article/politismos/arxeio-politismoy/metan8rwpismos-h-filosofikh-sygkroysh-gia-to-mellon-toy-an8rwpoy (accessed: 20/5/2018).
10 The best-known example is the influential exhibition Post-Human (1992), curated by Jeffrey Deitch and organised by the DESTE Foundation.
11 Peter Sloterdijk, «Rules for the Human Park. A Response to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism», in Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger, trans. Ian Alexander Moore & Christopher Turner, Polity Press, Cambridge 2017, p. 196.
12 This «battle» was to find its apogee in the self-portrait Trampling down death by death of three years later (2017).
13 «One’s creative process», says writer Dimitris Dimitriadis, «aims at gradually transubstantiating the darkness, the gloom one carries inside as a veiled conscience; at turning this gloom into a work. […] It is a terrible battle, a formidable conflict; the most fearful confrontation. But it is also a liberation, this transformation; a catharsis». Dimitris Dimitriadis, Το πέρασμα στην άλλη όχθη. Συζητήσεις με τον Γιώργο Καλιεντζίδη, Agra, Athens, 2005, p. 90-91.
14 Βλ. Jean-Paul Sartre, «St George and the Dragon», p. 182.
15 The text forms part of the book Nikos Moschos, published on the occasion of the artist’s participation in SWAB BARCELONA. International Contemporary Art Fair, in October 2014. The title of the exhibition was The Marriage of Flesh and Machine.
16 Roger Dadoun, La violence essai sur l’homo violens, Hatier, Paris 1993.
17 Ibid.
18 See Dimitra Makrynioti (ed.), Τα όρια του σώματος. Διεπιστημονικές προσεγγίσεις, Nissos, Athens 2004.
19 See Nikos Moschos. Inevitable Nature, published on the occasion of the artist’s participation, through the Ena Gallery, in SWAB, Barcelona from September 29 to October 2, 2016.
20 According to Ann Gallagher, the term landscape is ambiguous because it “refers both to the perception of the place and to a representation of it – the environment encountered as well as its interpretation in an image, words and sounds”. See Gallagher’ text in the exhibition catalogue for Landscape, The British Council, London 2000, p. 5.
21 Marc Augé, Où est passé l’avenir?, Seuil, Paris 2011.
22 The artist himself confirms the relationship of his work with directing; conversation with Nikos Moschos, Athens, April 1, 2018.
23 “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times”. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey, W.W. Norton & Company Inc, New York 1962, p. 38-39.
24 See Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods, The MIT Press, London & Cambridge, Mass. 2004, p. xii.
25 Here we adopt a though of Dimitris Dimitriadis: «In any case, without an autobiography, i.e. without a personal life, no work can be produced. The work is the outcome; the starting point is the things one bears and suffers within the world. And this means that the world—or life, or whatever you want to call it—has never been good to man. The works demonstrate that man’s relationship with the world has always been anything from difficult to insufferable». See Το πέρασμα στην άλλη όχθη, Agra, Athens 2005, p. 104.