In the mind and heart of every poet there is Ithaca. One of its most crucial synonyms, art, has deposited its egg in this sweet, dramatic word which is at one and the same time name, place, history and destiny, as if it were an ideal nest. For thousands of years, from the unfathomable distance of myth, art evokes its return journey, the anabasis, detachment and reunion with the origin, a circumnavigation along the paths of life, of the world, of experience through the latitudes of disorientation and a rediscovery of oneself. Art as motive and destination, as the ingenious vehicle of a navigation full of risks, trials, bewilderment and uncertain berths. But also as a spring-board towards the essential discovery of self-consciousness and a revelation of reality.
I read these radical essences in the dry rhetoric of Costas Tsoclis, these constant interrogations of the permanent flow of the phenomenal real, always so mutable, ambiguous and difficult to grasp: the dynamo of doubt feeds the interrogative act which his work arouses so incessantly as to appear to be one of the prevailing aspects of his seeking. "This is why," Tsoclis states, "I try to keep the interrogating mind active, in myself and in others. The most consistent thing in my work is the unceasing search for an image which will coincide with reality."(1) In this way the lines that define the boundary between reality and an illusion, between essence and appearance seem to dissolve, reciprocally fueling the cognitive drama, the enigma, the unreachable seat of identifiable reality. The conflict between the real and the true is the first of the oppositions that become evident in the work of Tsoclis. The membrane between metaphor and authenticity is so fine as to be indistinguishable in most of his works. To this extent the episode which took place in '86 at the 46th Biennale in Venice is both memorable and documented: when the magistrates of that city exonerated the artist and archived a request for the seizure of the work Harpooned Fish (1985) presented in the Greek Pavilion at the Biennale, claimed by some to be 'offensive' towards that creature, so vivid, though totally imaginative, was the representation conceived by Tsoclis. But the fiction produced by the language had evidently aroused an emotional reaction which underlines the efficaciousness of Tsoclis' linguistic construction. When closely analyzed, this construction shows itself in a number of cases -for example in the works, Boat (1979), The Sea as I Remember It (1983), Rain (1985), Tree (1981) and others, as an expert dissolving between the material real and the pictorial virtual or even (as in the case of the Harpooned Fish) impalpable and immaterial as in the projections onto pictorially prepared supports. In The Diary of an Exhibition (1983) Tsoclis thwarts the osmosis between reality and virtuality by introducing into the gallery space, together with the fire of parts of the work itself, and as a device for increasing ambiguity, a large mirror, which, besides the effect of spatial amplification, produces an inverted perspective with the effect of articulating the image to an extremely effective dagree of disorientation. Unlike Pistoletto or Richter, the use of the mirror by Tsoclis attempts to accentuate the illusory element in order to dramatize the interrogation of reality. One must not forget that for a man like him, poetically on a journey towards an original shore which invokes return, the distinction which is increasingly more necessary to make between the choices to be made, between the reason for bewilderment and what is redeeming, becomes essential. The misleading value of illusoriness, the extremely reduced membrane between reality and fiction, between the essential and the ephemeral, in extreme synthesis between authentic and false, has its antecedent in the emblematic and mythological figure of the siren, with every attractive and fatal consequence which its power to enchant implies. From this point of view one of the most suggestive translations of that ancient incarnation of the faculty for deceitful stupefaction (with which art too is endowed) reappears in the work of Magritte, in his surreal transfiguration, after the admirable ancient challenges between Zeus and Parrasius.
Yet, like them, Tsoclis does not give up evoking that illusoriness since, as Pessoa writes, "Only in the illusion of liberty/ does liberty exist". (2)
What Tsoclis gathers, in his meditating action in allowing an image to spring from the association of simple but powerfully evocative elements, a stone, drapery, a ladder, a bucket, a page from a newspaper, pigment, wood or anything else, is an essential node, the component of the dream in the tension of wakefulness. The Hamlet-like doubt, it too elevated between presence and absence, dream and death, has over the centuries known a number of poetic exemplifications that, even though they do not bring resolution to our lives, actively sustain resistance to fatal abandon. Tsoclis moves along a Heraclitean threshold according to which "all things are and are not", and therefore appear to be "all true". (3)
Life is flow, and the springs from which its essential veins come forth are multiple, as in the forest of water tubes and buckets that occupy the space of the celebrated One Hundred Taps that Drip into One Hundred Buckets (1983). But life for the artist is also an Odyssey and labyrinth into which one enters in order to understand the very sight and sense of our apparition and eclipse ourselves in it. So the work of Tsoclis is not only catalyzing for those who encounter it, but also a visualization of multiple enigmas that surround us and to which it is difficult to give a sense and an answer. Through such congenital absence life and enigma have always accompanied each other and their manifestation imposes itself and consumes itself while dispersing itself, firstly through the loss of unity and integrity of things, and then through evident ruin, to the point of extinction. The purity and innocence evoked in Artemis (1977) seem to be Platonically idealized entities which reality has undertaken to slowly dissolve through an irremediable fall and a future regeneration. Of that golden age, evoked by a child, a heartbeat remains in the world, ardent and alive like a flame whose presence Tsoclis' art means to resuscitate. This too, among the works exhibited in Prato, is the Ithaca which he, from image to image, as Cavafy has shown, does not stop pursuing or dreaming of.
Always keep Ithaca in the mind.
Your destiny dreams that shore for you.
But do not hasten your journey.
Better let it last for years so that, when old
you finally put in to that island,
rich with what you learnt along the way,
without expecting it to give you wealth.
Ithaca has bestowed the great journey upon you.
Without her you would not have parted.
Nothing can give you more..."(4)
Bruno Corΰ
Art Director, Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art
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