The enigma of portrait painters relates to this evident peculiarity: they want to paint something that is not a landscape, an object, a quadruped, or a creature that can be detached from time. The face narrates itself, it is a treasury of the past and a rebirth of the self - with what language can this be done well? In a sense, it has something dreamlike. Just like a dream, when you see it, you are there, even with your eyes closed, and as soon as you awaken, it dissolves with a rustle; the face maintains suspicious relationships with the unreal.
There are moments when the painter feels that what hinders him is the art itself and his technique, the colors and brushes, the canvas and its surface. Since expectation contrives a detachment of the internal from the external, why should he torment himself with the geography of form? It would be more correct to throw away the body and keep the soul. Or, in the best case, to believe that there is an externality of the internal and an internality of the external.
Painting, in order to find itself, first studies the invisible. A harsh apprenticeship and a great tutor of self-knowledge and guidance. What meaning do some wrinkles on a tired head, some sagging cheeks, or the glow that reflects young eyes have? Reality seems precious if we trust it. Through the minimal and the trivial, we make a leap over time and ourself.
Pascal was amazed because things we do not pay attention to, a chicken for example or a rag, transform into values through painting. Also, the painter can stage a crazy, ritualistic dance, with all sorts of colorful gestures, where, beyond representation, it is as if he is appeasing the demon that dwells behind and within the eyes.
It is worth emphasizing that the toil in this representation of the unrepresentable knows no end. The work always remains unfinished. The wood won’t catch fire even if we have the flames ready. The closer we approach a face, the more it distances itself not outwardly but inwardly from the painter - a distance that belongs more to art and less to form and its transformations.
Specifically, we paint it as long as we can endure it. In the fine arts, to be serious requires a hefty dose of madness - which is not illness but health of the soul. Unlike knowledge, where the new is added, haphazardly, to the old and forms a system, in the arts, we intuit a world emerging from nothing, from impulses through which the painter generates not only paintings but also his own creative self.
This enthusiastic labor leaves many chips, scraps, and sighs; even better. Luckily, everything in life is disguise, pose, and lowliness. Virtue does not exist. It is invented. And Christidis’ paintings do as well.
Kostis Papagiorgis
