Critics

Translated from the original Spanish.

In the context of contemporary art of the second half of the 20th century, the mechanisms of assimilation and reception of the work of the artists who lived permanently or for long periods abroad are essential. Of special interest is the case of Greek artists and specifically the painter Dimitri Perdikidis (1922-1989), who lived in Madrid from 1953 to 1985. This article focuses on the analysis of some aspects of the process of integration of his work in the Spanish artistic context, taking into consideration its critical reception.

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Translated from the original Spanish.

Dimitri Perdikidis’s current painting — that of the Hispanized Greek — is the reverse of his earlier work. Today it offers a pathetic image of reality, as yesterday it offered the inner image of man. Yesterday it was informalism; today it is a document of the world around us. The mass media — cinema, photography or the poster — were once influenced by pure art. Today it is art that reclaims that inheritance, and approaches cinema in those sequences that offer us successive moments of an action. Perdikidis, classical by Hellenic nature, entrusts all the pathos of the works he shows at Galería Ynguanzo to the character of the images used, drawn from photography. But he narrates in a contained way, with an impassive technique, spraying colour like a poster artist, so that no trace of his nervous hand may remain to give him away. He recounts horror without expressionist outbursts. A demonstration, some prisoners, a mother with her child: there is the reality of the newspapers. Yet all of them appear framed within rigorous structures — arrows, signs, punched tapes — which, by contrast, heighten that pathos. Sometimes the symbol is a classical head, about to be trampled by soldiers, crowned with thorns. The pathos, I insist, comes from the calm with which he tells us what is atrocious; from the contrast between elements taken from life and those contributed by art. It is impossible beauty, resigned to being documentary expression — a realm already without magic, a useless frame for the horrors of our world.

Translated from the original Spanish.

SYMBOL AND MESSAGE

The analysis of the content of Dimitri Perdikidis’s work can be ascribed to the genre of “reportage art”. His repertoire is treated according to the techniques of photography, but only apparently, for in fact it is fashioned by hand. It is an analogon of reality. (Nor can one speak here of some hyperrealism that pursues an identical reproduction of the natural motif.)

Perdikidis’s image, through the “alterations” it undergoes, escapes a photographic definition, just as happens with the universe of the image that acquires colossal densities in the visual mass media — that is, in the daily press, in magazines, on television, and so on — not to mention images received directly from the optical environment. Because of this density, such images come to erode, dilute, turn entropic and finally lose their informative impact. That phenomenon occurs even with the most pathetic or sensational images, yet their redundancy is such that the recipient of the news barely glances at them for a second, without even reflecting on their meaning, for they remain on the periphery of normal perception. (Indeed, perception, however acute, cannot cope with this enormous block of stimuli that assails it almost without interruption.) Faced with this kind of information, other communicative means are needed in order to correct the photographic visual message and thus restore to the possible image its authentic informative value. That is what Perdikidis achieves through the aforementioned “alterations”. The spectator is no longer before something inert and highly serialized, but before a true idiolect that summons his highest perceptual level. This implies the transcendence of a “natural” reality (or of what might be considered as such) into a symbolic one. And since man is a “symbol-making animal”, the efficacy of his perceptions will always stand in direct relation to his symbolizing capacities.

But if all that has been said corresponds to semantic information, it does not for that reason exhaust the content of Perdikidis’s message, for upon this information another — aesthetic — is superimposed, whose segments must be elucidated. Indeed, the icon is integrated into a system of chromatically treated “networks”, large in proportion to it (a contrast that brings out still more the visualisation and a mathematical rigidity, cold and spectral). By their compositional system they would be self-sufficient for an individualized interpretation (just as the icon isolated from its reticular context would be). To such structures other symbols charged with meaning are added — especially computer tapes, the dehumanization of interhuman communications — or the “arrow” indicators that point to the icon, as if they were premonitory signals.

The connotations of the theme thus globalized are formalized by a single “deep structure”: terror — both the terror of war and that of anti-popular repression. The rhetoric of the discourse is not only persuasive but coercive for the spectator, even the most aseptic before the tragedy of the man of our day, which Dimitri Perdikidis denounces with uncommon talent, courage and efficacy.

Translated from the original Spanish.

A FEW WORDS ON DIMITRI PERDIKIDIS

Looking at Perdikidis’s recent paintings, I have lived again the anguish, the agony and the struggle of an age — of our age, but also of every age. Here, chronographic, journalistic and photographic everydayness meets the eternal, annulling every anecdotal or intentional element and overcoming the danger of the conventional or the merely symbolic. The perfection of technique, the severe predominance of the expressive means (the result of great research, practice, experience and of an indomitable effort — finally concealed) impose such a discipline on the painting that all the “parts”, all the details of the “subject” (always anthropocentric) converge in a unity and a symmetry so sober and “natural” that the consciously tragic passes mechanically, with scrupulous repeated motifs, into the apparently decorative and from there into the Dorically monumental — monumental without emphasis, not at all pompous. Thus Perdikidis, despite all the influence of the Spanish school, continues to be Greek.

Translated from the original Spanish.

Dimitri Perdikidis’s current works reflect not only an artist’s concerns with the specific problems of the art of his moment, but also those of a man conscious of and committed to his time. For this reason these works combine the stylistic resources of avant-garde languages with the typifications of certain historical situations that we are living through and suffering. This exhibition is the sedimentation of a process of updating the plastic language along the line of the most advanced experiences of recent years, and of the artist’s commitment as a historical being to themes that affect us all.

From a stylistic point of view, the present works offer several perspectives of analysis. In the first place, as a general note one observes that stylistic approaches always operate in function of the meaningful contents he wishes to express and communicate through them. The dependence between the two levels is constant. To that end he appropriates stimuli of diverse origin, crystallizing in a very peculiar and personal synthesis that gives the works a differentiating character… But Perdikidis does not let himself be surprised by the formalist spell common in these tendencies; rather he strengthens this composition and confers a different sense upon it through a representation linked to the linguistic techniques of different media. If in some earlier works certain contradictions appeared among these languages of different origins, now, by contrast, the dialectic is resolved by devices such as, for example, a computer program tape. On the other hand, the existence of these constructivist hints has never been something petrified or rationalist; it has undergone the influence of a lyrical and poetic charge translated into formal and chromatic transitions, interferences between geometric and figurative elements, the creation of different spaces, the penetration and superposition of figures. Likewise, optical repetition structures serve as a constructive frame for the techniques of serialization and repetition of the figures represented. For this he turns to photographic techniques and sequences in the treatment of the image. The intention in all of this is not only to provoke a visual impact — which would make the whole work fail — but also, and above all, to facilitate communication, the intelligibility of the messages. Serialization and the enlargement of a detail, manifested in the creation of neutral zones, intensify the symbolic values, the relations among the different meanings present in the work. Likewise, in this new phase colours also heighten their symbolic value with a clear and concrete significant reference to the themes treated.

The whole thematic centres on localizable and recognizable facts of the climate of violence that exists, motivated by events that are in everyone’s mind. The works become a denunciation of the stifling atmosphere of the cybernetic control of the human being through the infernal machineries of war and destruction. Not in the abstract, however, but with evident allusions to reality and typifications easily identifiable by spectators.

Translated from the original Spanish.

The case of Perdikidis — of Greek origin and settled in Spain for years, after having confirmed his vocation as a painter — lends itself to endorsing a supposed analogy with El Greco. That would be to go wildly astray, since Perdikidis is, above all, a painter of our time, just as El Greco was an artist of the sixteenth century.

For that reason, beyond far-fetched coincidences, the two are radically separated by their lack of simultaneity — a fact discovered with full precision if we analyse the latest period of Perdikidis’s work, which I consider the most characteristic and therefore the one that best defines a personality akin to the time we live in.

Although Perdikidis allowed himself to be influenced, during the first years he lived in our country, by Spanish painting, his return to Greece and his re-encounter with Hellenic culture marked in him a new stage which, arising through a mental process, was rigorously formulated as a decantation of the spirit, attained by pure intellect, in contrast with his earlier period, much more temperamental.

We observe, then, that up to that moment Perdikidis developed in his work what we might consider concepts fixed by tradition and perfectly classified by theorists of civilizations as unappealable norms. But in his defence we must recognize the easy enthusiasm such theories can awaken in artists, fundamentally concerned with their destiny, before the illusion of taking part — following premeditated disquisitions — in that generic current into which, in desperation, they seek to integrate themselves as a solution for their longing for universalism.

Yet a moment comes when painting, which can only operate with realities, makes him understand that this comfortable inner situation, the tranquillity of knowing oneself protected, shows his subordination, his renunciation of the struggle. And when he believed himself freest, he perceives that he is limited by an abstract idea of existence in which man has a place only as form, without any expressive content.

Noting this fact, from which many artists withdraw, the painter may come to identify with man, without that implying a strictly romantic process. I would rather say that this condition is reached through an ethical process, determined by the responsibilities that the various incidents shaping the human being exercise upon him. Such is the case of Perdikidis’s present stage, in which, abandoning pre-established criteria, always of a static order, he enters into the individual in order to reflect his human function, of a dynamic order. To achieve this end he ceases to pursue the recreation of a temperament before nature or the embodiment of a supposed aesthetic absolute. He confines himself to setting out the consequences of a moral degradation — a state that allows him to enrich his work with the force that feeling releases when it handles extreme images, subject only to their own definition.

For this reason, good and evil appear for the first time in his paintings — not as an abstract concept, but as something real that reaches individuals, that can destroy them — and by this path he succeeds in expressing in his pictures the pain of inescapable existence, by rendering a transposition of the physical suffering that can also grip us in broad daylight, under a blue sky, beside the sea…

Translated from the original Spanish.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH DIMITRI PERDIKIDIS

The paintings would not fit through the studio door. Dimitri Perdikidis’s vigour needed to expand into works of respectable dimensions, of a kind that is already hard to find in today’s conspiracy of modesties and briefnesses. He laboured like a porter to extract and provisionally mount an enormous triptych which, not without effort, stood clear and visible before my eyes. Clear and visible, visible and clear? Rather protagonist and master of the studio, leaving us all and everything diminished and subject to its beauty. Red and white, white and red — but of a whiteness and a scarlet that almost made one ill with their triumphant and most beautiful affirmation of essential bichromy. A force made of virginity and of violence that swept everything else away, blinding or making the eyes grow and rush to meet that apparition of powerful painting, ordering, logically proud of itself. It was an invention as simple and as happy as great successes usually are. It was night, and the electric bulb paled under the impact of colour — or of semi-colour, for white is not colour — and as much might have happened in full daylight. And already in the street, the eyes remained comforted by that blessed cooperation between the virginal and the bloody. Of healthy blood, of good blood, of the blood of health.

Colour of health, millenary sensibility, shadow and sign of figuration, all the great sensory richness of abstract possibilities, the taming and raising of mystery — would anything more be lacking in this tall and powerful Greek? Yes, and now it has just been said, and said that he possesses it: power. There is in all his work — that of now, the most recent and the most mature — an unequivocal sample of force, of presence, of vigour, of dominion, of such security that they subdue the spectator. I suspect he paints and creates his strong and beautiful pictures with the very same naturalness with which Heracles performed his twelve labours. And it could not be otherwise, once so many gifts are at hand in the superb Greco-Hispanic painter. He is like a force of nature devoted to painting on a grand scale, intensely, deeply, in every direction free of limits. One can imagine what an enormous hall would be — a hall or salon for whatever purpose one wished — decorated like a Sistine Chapel of the newest art by the Heraclean force of Dimitri Perdikidis. For the truth is that the panels are already proving too small for his unleashed and just ambition. Let us hope that someday the fates grant him that possibility.

I have seldom seen a painter so in love with his craft, his tools, his materials, to the extreme that he seems to enjoy the task of painting more than that of finishing a picture and, with it, that activity. Speaking of his marvellous reds, he shows me a tin of that same red, and exhibits it like a vessel containing something sacred: “Look. See what purity of colour, here inside…”

But no. The purity of colour does not reside in that industrially prepared container, and that colour — no doubt excellent to begin with — will be the same that other far less powerful colleagues use. The purity of colour is not in the tin, but administered upon the painted surface, painted precisely by him. Painted, moreover, not on canvas but on panel. He prefers panel because he says the paste of colour runs better and the perfectly smooth surface returns as much gratitude to the action of the brushstroke. That may be so. I prefer to believe it is due to survivals and atavisms of a painter of Greek icons, from the years when our — and his — Dominico left Fodele, Crete and the whole Eastern Mediterranean, shutting himself away in Toledo.

Chaire, Dimitri Perdikidis, chaire! And our gratitude for having brought to twentieth-century Spanish art that distant, familiar, singular, most refined breath of your land — also of oil and wine, also of holm oaks and goats. Since nothing separated us, and since everything united us, you came to Spain and found her a friend. You are fecundating the newest and most humid Spanish painting of recent making, with a security and freshness of which you alone are not responsible, but the load of centuries upon your shoulders. And you let us see a work of goodness and quality that is almost painful, by virtue of how much the spectator is obliged by its beauty, by the impact of its organized force, by so many further virtues that cannot be glossed in brief space. Nor would it be necessary, because what matters is not to gloss or comment, but to understand. And be certain, Dimitri Perdikidis, that we understand you, and that in the broad roundness of present Spanish art you are among your own — just as your countryman Dominico walked through Toledo.

Again, for you and for Elena, I say: Chaire!

Translated from the original Spanish.

DIMITRI PERDIKIDIS — A GREEK IN SPAIN

A Greek painter who lives in Spain: the words have as it were an ancient resonance… To be Greek — that is, to have inherited a sense of equilibrium, or perhaps a logic for understanding disequilibrium — and to live in Spain — that is, to be a witness of violence and of contradiction: that is what fundamentally characterizes Dimitri Perdikidis. Of course no one is anything fundamental by divine right, and Dimitri Perdikidis is not “Greek” by the sole right of his birth. He is so by personal choice, because his way of being coincides with an established and recognized cultural “manner”. I shall not enter now into disquisitions on that particular. It interests me only to establish the double constitutive ingredient of an art — the sense of harmony and the sense of violence — from the point of view of their possible origins.

Nor do I wish to fall into the easy temptation of seeing agglutinated — now in Dimitri, earlier in Dominico — the two antagonistic forces of The Birth of Tragedy. But, by a very different path and in a very different style, what is characteristic in them with respect to Spanish life is not only being witnesses (every artist is, in reality, a witness), but being conscious spectators. One is a spectator when one is, in some way, outside the spectacle — in this case, outside the drama of the Spanish — even when one is not necessarily neutral. Dimitri would be a Spanish painter if he tried to see equilibrium from violence; but in reality he is a Greek artist because he tries to see violence from equilibrium. Note that I use, with full deliberation, two characterizing commonplaces: equilibrium for the Greek; violence for the Spanish. I know that to no people belongs a characteristic by divine right, but many of them possess them by historical fact. And at least as far as we are concerned, that historical characteristic has not yet been modified.

Enough. What interests now is only to see how that discovery of violence from equilibrium, or of contradiction from harmony, is materialized in Perdikidis.

It is not enough to break a Doric column for it to acquire the gesture of aggression: incrusted in the subtlest of its formal folds, harmony survives — that is, the absence of gesture, the equation that promotes equilibrium. Nor in Perdikidis’s canvases is violence hidden wherever allusion to form appears, however much it may be attacked by the germ of disintegration: it is necessary to plant, opposite that symptom of measure, the symptom of excess. Thus is born, in a parcel of his art, the deliberate “formless”, which is all the more so in his case because its generative root is in transformed representation — that is, in deformed form. Perdikidis does not need, like a Spaniard, to fight against painting with matter nor to fight against colour with the antichromatism of violent black. It is a painting that lives within painting, without wounding it, organizing harmonies from the most pristine colours. But he organizes violence with full deliberation by opposing the formless — which is gesture, discomposure, the violation of equilibrium — to the formal, to what is truly abstract because it lives enclosed in the formula of equilibrium. Violence, then, is not in the sign of violence but in the violation, by negative opposition, of the contrast with the harmonious. There is thus in his work a reversibility and mutuality of negations that lead to his fundamental affirmation: criticism, sarcasm, denunciation, the synthetic and significant testimony of a reality.

Translated from the original Spanish.

That robustness and elegant serenity, that carefully cherished craft, those ordered surfaces worked with delicacy, upon which from time to time the lightest frets and graphisms appeared, are now contrasts of white and red, of yellow and white, with glued fabrics, with traits of fire. All this is like a great passion laboriously mastered. For in Perdikidis passion does not take showy forms of wrath. In today’s baroque Perdikidis, that of diagonal rhythms, yesterday’s classic weighs — measure and restraint. His world has again peopled itself with almost real beings, with almost human spectres. He is now stronger and more human than before. And also more mysterious, despite his clarity. It is that myth — not only in the titles of his works, which would not be the least of it — walks underground here, animating forms and colours, making matter vibrate, struggling to reveal itself. What there is in these paintings, beneath their slow craftsmanship, is the painter’s struggle to discover for himself the image of the world. And for that reason there remains in them that point of concern and of battle that gives Perdikidis’s painting its maximum beauty and its unmistakable emotion.

Translated from the original Spanish.

Perdikidis, who though Greek by birth is Spanish as regards his will to formal expression, facture and pictorial problematics, coincides with a great part of present Spanish non-objective painters in achieving a harmonious synthesis between contained forms and fluctuating textures. In his pictures painted or incised on thick panels, the artist succeeds in making float sandy accumulations (yet spectacularly careful) of burnished, spiritualized and sensitized paste. A remotely magical world, in which more than an influence of a Klee or a Miró there is a transcription of opposing dreams or intuitions of the artist, makes each painting by Dimitri Perdikidis a kind of open window that continually invites the spectator to a liberating escape. It is possible that one of the paths awaiting the painting of the future consists in alluding to the natural world that surrounds the artist, without his being obliged to represent it in his work. There exists in no painting by Perdikidis any recognizable object, yet all the works of his present stage create in the spectator the climate necessary for him to feel introduced into the ideal landscape, which may at times resemble that of Hellenic legends. Harmonious fusion of the most refined traditional sense and of the most rigorous contemporaneity, this admirable work of Perdikidis points toward tomorrow, yet at no moment denies an inescapable present that the artist accepts and transforms.