By Giorgos Mylonas

30/11/2024

Young in years, when he left Knossos to study at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Nikos Moschos had his senses set at high intensity. Everything he saw and heard was metabolized into his work with draftsmanship of impressive quality—remarkable for someone so young—and with a sensitivity that quickly distinguished him from the artists of his generation. This quality, of approaching the world through a unique filter, was not only preserved over time but enriched with a wealth of intellectual resources and fruitful questions.

Today, at 45, Moschos formulates his questions about the world and the place of modern man within a continuous flow, a river into which fragments constantly fall, forming the human face. This is how his works may be viewed: as cryptic psychological portraits with fractured unity. Successive associations, starting from reality and filtered through mental shifts and transcendences, are distilled into his art allegorically. Faithful to the nature of painting, he records life as a reflection of fragments, as a dream. The deliberate ambiguity of his narrative expresses a mood of inner wandering and an emotional flow toward his favored imagery: scenes from the Altar of Pergamon at the eponymous museum in Berlin, familiar faces, personal experiences—through which he shapes a new space, open to memory and fantasy. His images, statuesque and colorful, in a palette that never reaches excess, interpenetrate one another, just like associative thoughts in our minds. We cannot connect the scenes through logic. We are invited to surrender and wander through them.

From the latest body of work that the painter presents in Cyprus, we may pick up the thread with the composition titled “The sleeplessness of reason…” (a “descendant” of Goya’s iconic series of etchings that we will soon enjoy at our National Gallery). In a tone equally distant from light and darkness, evoking the feel of 1970s photography, the artist follows this process: he shapes images by blending recognizable and abstract elements. These, though initially disconnected, eventually penetrate one another, weaving a story that belongs to no specific place or time. Painted fragments from the statue of Apollo Musagetes crown the figure of Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s famous film), while at the center we recognize the painter’s own face on the aged body of an otherworldly figure.

“Works cannot exist if they are not carriers of ideas and emotions. When they have no reason to exist, they become merely decorative elements,” I quote from the painter’s interview. What, then, is Moschos’s purpose—what preoccupies him? The digital age, spearheaded by Artificial Intelligence and its breakthroughs across various fields, provokes feelings of fear and an anxious search for a stable frame of reference. The explosive triumph of digital technology has pulled the rug out from under our feet, stripping us of any steady worldview, introducing us into a kingdom of chaotic conceptualization that replaces the object, and imposing rhythms that allow not tranquility—indeed, not even adaptation. What for centuries was a “thing” is now a “construct.”

Science has led us into such abstractions that our logic—Euclidean though it may still be—cannot transmute. We follow these abstractions theoretically—of a matter that is now quasi-matter, in quasi-time, quasi-space—yet it is impossible for all this to become lived experience, to become a way of life. Our knowledge increasingly contradicts and nullifies our experiential reality. And as our “world” is composed as much of knowledge as of lived experience, a sense of emptiness bridges the gap between the two.

The painter is not a technophobe, nor does he attempt to turn his brushes into a scourge against science. But as there never have been—and never can be—societies capable of absorbing a technology that surpasses them, every era of great scientific discovery provokes a technological Valhalla within existing social structures. The painter is a man of his time, and his voice is that of a creator whose thought extends universally. In an era dominated by the velocity of information, Moschos seeks to open the door to another experience, to a more radical, essentially poetic mode of thought.

For Moschos, time is not linear: past and present coexist, provoking the creation of a new reality. Time is shattered, becoming prismatic, like a mirror in which images intertwine, subjecting the viewer to multiple networks that constitute distortions—luminous distortions—of space and time, with autonomy, materiality, and a life of their own. Through a painterly collage approaching the logic of cinematic montage, he continuously fuses present with past, yesterday with tomorrow. This unorthodox montage of multilayered reality—through images from memory, dreams, and an emotional perception of the material world—offers us the experience of an inner space.

The entire work of Moschos balances between the metaphysical and the realistic. It is complex yet sincere, subjective but not egocentric. His compositions are not “easily digestible”; they are not meant for the hurried viewer. His work demands time, calm, and focus; his language is full, rich, distinct, often requiring the viewer’s own input. His greatest gift, however, is that he can communicate effortlessly with an international audience (his works belong to the Fondazione Orestiadi / Sicily, Sammlung Schirm / Berlin, PTE Fine Arts / New York, Bernard Cheong Collection / Singapore).

Born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1979, Nikos Moschos took his first lessons from his father, also a painter, Takis Moschos. “One of my favorite places, then and now, was his studio, where I spent endless hours studying, copying, and discussing,” he has said. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1997–2003), and even during his student years, collectors had begun purchasing his work.

References to Hellenistic sculpture, the Baroque, Expressionism (Francis Bacon’s distortions), and Neue Sachlichkeit (Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz), as well as comics, cinema, and Dadaist sculptural machines, enrich his personal idiom without overpowering it. He metabolizes all this into a chromatic and stylistic language full of movement, fluidity, and a constant alternation of states, human experiences, and emotions. His résumé is full of international exhibitions. This marks his first solo exhibition in Cyprus, hosted at Stand in Line – Art Space in Nicosia until December 7.