What is set forth in the work of Costas Tsoclis does not just concern an artistic talent now consecrated at an international level, a talent that by right becomes part of the context of multimedial and environmental research through its inventive generosity and amplitude of aesthetic discoveries. To a great extent, with this exhibition at the Pecci Center --the most exhaustive organised up to now by this Greek artist, and not only in Italy-- what is proposed is that which in times of spreading statelessness for art, rightly or wrongly, is held to be marginal or, at the most, implied, in relation to the presence that the exhibition scene occupies. The fact is that Tsoclis brings with him his own culture and his own roots just as a nomad brings his own tent, and he does so in such a paradigmatic and illuminating way that justice would not be paid to his work if it were only evaluated outside that relationship. This dependency, as much desired as suffered today, has allowed him to become the interpreter of an ethnos that, once due tribute to color and folklore has been rendered, aspires to recognition of itself in a diachronic concept of universality: the one owed to it by historical investiture --to which western conscience is in debt and which we all, more or less, are aware of being acquainted with-- and the one, more arduous and ambitious, which with the first concept has created ties that are not uncommonly in conflict, and which has to face up to the contemporary, even at the cost of "dishonouring" our forefathers. In the generation of Tsoclis, or with a year or two's difference, there are artists equally engaged, at home and abroad, who testify to the renewal of Greek art of the post-war period; all, like him, protagonists of the diaspora that, according to Christos M. Joachimides has contributed to constructing the capital appearance of the Greek artistic scene of the present time: Takis, Kounellis, Chryssa, Antonakos, Caniaris, Samaras, Pavlos, to whom must be added Nikos, Thodoros, Gaitis and Danil: these are the most significant names of that "physical and spiritual transhumanity" in the direction of Paris, New York and Rome, where with varying fortune art was marking time with the times.
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Among the protagonists of the Greek diaspora of the post-war period, Tsoclis is in this sense the artist-synecdoche who with the greatest amplitude of expressive registry, through a work that presents itself as being among the most complex and articulated of the global artistic scene of the last thirty years, has been able to intercept those signs, give them renewed significance subtracting them from the mausoleums of the past and their sublime commonplaces. What I want to say is that the moment in which he settled accounts with atavism, his search succeeded in increasing itself and finding repercussion outside "the local" context, to the point where it suggests a path that art at the turn of the century seemed to have lost: prefiguring, that is, the recovery of particularisms as a condition upon which to found a principle of universality. Running contrary, therefore, to the widespread practice which imposed the universal at the cost of the indiscriminate abolition of those particularisms, just as the present validation of artistic languages clearly demonstrates. Therefore, from its historical beginning up until the present day, from the corner of that "diversity" already synonymous with border, regionalism and minority, Greek art, through a work like this could become a sort of spontaneous model for the most advanced international visual research.
Returning to the premise, the work of Tsoclis connotates itself therefore as a "universal specific" --allow me the apparent contradiction-- in the sense that it is in a position to be acknowledged by all even in the particularitity of its makeup, which remains, as we say, unmistakably Greek. In the syllogism lies the demonstration that art no longer needs to speak Esperanto --such, I repeat, seems to have become the condition of its very subsistence-- in order to reveal itself to the world. A lesson, a message? Difficult to say. But certainly proof that the strongest signs can arrive today from the outer edges: admitted that in art there is still a sense of distinguishing between capital and suburb, between province and empire, when we know that the loss of centrality - the last endured by New York, as it was before, in order of events, by Paris, Berlin and Vienna - is a truth that we can lay our hands on; and when the very concept of the West --Bernard Blistene reminds us of this-- pushed to extreme geographic (and cultural) consequences, crosses over to that of the East.
Even from this point of view it is not unlikely that the most meaningful proposition of the modern age may come from cultural minorities. As Anna Kafetsi writes: "Modernity is not the privilege of a single place. It reappears many times, and the central or peripheral nature of every genesis cannot serve as the only criterion for its appraisal and even less for its interpretation..."
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From a completely ethnic perspective, we know, Tsoclis has again found the way of universality, which is that of cultural roots but also of the artist's vision. "When you see these works, that are no more than stones, I mean when you get to know my country, perhaps then you will understand that Greece is "only" these stones; and that I do not speak culture like the others, but nature". And again: "If these cliffs and these stones were art, then it is not true that we Greeks are cut out of contemporary art and that we have never put foot in a museum. On the contrary, we have always lived in Immense museums that simply do not have signs at the entrance". Demosthenes Dawetas gathers up this mental and mystical transfer that Tsoclis has established with the natural order with a parable: "With fire, Prometheus also stole Art from the king of the gods, which he offered as a gift to men in order to gladden their life. Art has therefore become their second nature, and nature, fatally, the object of research in their art...".
Tsoclis knows above all that to be Greek is neither an investiture nor an alibi, above all if we are artists. Even less if we are artists and also philosophers, as he is."I would like my work to have the same emotional impact as phenomena in nature do, to activate the same mechanisms of motion and destruction, the same secretions...". And, insisting on this theme: "I have uncovered one contrary sequence that binds the object, the material and nature. In my more recent work I have tried to fuse in one artistic expression the image, the source of that image, and the way in which this source manifests itself. As if one painted the portrait of a person using human meat instead of color..."
The reflection on the infinite potentialities of artistic procedures borders on a sort of conspiratorial confession, of stoic, even provoking irony: "Nothing of what I make is mine... As an example, I found these newspapers in a stadium after the game. The colors come from a load of ocher in a truck abandoned on a bridge in Germany. I found the boat on a deserted beach, the taps at various sites, the trees where they were, the steel sheets on the edge of the sea, the pictures in frame shops, the mirrors here and there..."
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It was an acknowledgement of oneself in recognizing the roughness of the Greek landscape inasmuch as it is category of the spirit: like having the perception of the abstract within the feeling of the concrete, until arriving, through consonance, at the absolute archetype, the maternal and ancient landing place, the element that can only have a Greek name: Thalassa.
Carried out at the same time as that of the trees, the cycle of the sea allows the work of Tsoclis to attain a "classic" measure. The return to nature is also recovery from inside a civilization, its own, learnt again life --"not from books and not from the museums"-- which is manifested through a cosmic element in turn pertaining to the imagination of all. An adventurous and suffered retrieval, which could have failed along the multiple private and professional circumstances lived across Europe, at the times of the diaspora. But it is above all a resumption that reassures the artist of the universality of his memory, of his faith, his senses, and therefore of the limitless possibilities of transmitting the work that comes out of it. All that which is Greek is human: it is essentially this equivalence which acts as a guide to the existential, philosophical and creative research conducted by Tsoclis, at the time when he contradicts the censorship of Wilhelm Hense who, in order to restrain the excesses of Winckelmann, had got to the point of formulating the statement "all art is human and not Greek".
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To Tsoclis it is not enough however to "represent" nature in its recognizable signs. In One hundred taps dripping into a hundred buckets (1983) the formula of ten years before returns --even if in a more imposing and complex version-- with which "the captive" nature comes metaphorised through hydraulic mechanisms. We find there again also the subject for the reflecting surface, that is of the "reproduced" universe from one of its elements: in this case, from the water which here takes on the value of filter, of ephemeral mirror of the surrounding reality. The dripping, the scansion of its sonorous rhythm and the length of time required to fill the containers widen the capacity of the participation needed thus, in order to fulfil] itself, in our time, finally to the psycho-sensory sphere. The involvement that Tsoclis demands from the time of this work on is, in the end, that of the "here and now", of life, of its flagrancy.
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In 1994, at Delphi, Tsoclis rediscoverd the same motivations of the Christian myth in the Python installation, where Apollo, the divine archer, takes the place of Saint George. The similarity of the subjects explains the ambivalence of the archetype, to the extent that language and materials make use now of new contributions, which are also those of the Deposition from the Cross, again of 1994, the fruit of "an idea born of a pagan impulse, but terminated with a Christian tribute". This idea had been based on the affinity between the cruel Delphic mystery and the martyrological one represented by the cross: one and the other lived as supernatural events in cosmic meaning, and therefore originating from the myth and contemplated by the same impartial distance. "The iconographic monks", writes Ahrweiler again, "cover the passion of Christ and the ecstasies of the martyrs with lively inks, in the conviction that, "if God wants it, the order of nature will be overturned". Without wanting to demonstrate anything, on the contrary, persisting in that escape from himself undertaken since his debut as an artist --"out of fear, but also out of nobility"--Tsoclis once again finds himself overturning the order of reality he is facing, placing in doubt the anecdotal appearance. "The truth is that I do not want to arrive at anything. When I realise I'm close to something that might be a goal, I distance myself immediately and start somewhere else".
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"Ι have tried to put in work that small amount of what is ancient which continues to mark my destiny this", Tsoclis says today about Artemis, an installation presented to the Mylos Center for "Salonica Cultural Capital of Europe 1997", that consists of a projection onto three large paintings dominated by the innocent and yet ambiguous presence of the goddess-child, the one who starts the rituals of puberty. In the largest we see the gradual and enervating transforming of itself into a mutilated and acephalous statue of the adolescent body, before its heart, pulsing and expanding like a fire through the entire screen-painting, bears the event which we witness at the epilogue. From life --the "physical" presence of Artemis-- in art and in its unmistakable signs --the sculpture, the fragment, the antiquity, the museum-- and then again of life represented with anatomical crudeness from a palpitating heart, Tsoclis traces for us the perfect circularity of a distance marked inexorably by Myth. Death and the regeneration of art --stands equally for civilization and the history of man-- would be tied by a relationship that only in life would find its pretext. But Artemis is also the erotic model that activates the revitalizing sap of the artist. Through the desired object --the virginal body-- the transfusion of creativity is completed. And it is Eros, the God protogonos, "he who was born first" who governs this transversal reconquest of innocence, and with it that of the human golden age.
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Before and After
That then, in the final analysis, means finding oneself again faced with the darkness, with the immeasurable solitude of the moment of creation. Only the suffering will then be an alternative to this solitude: "In order to produce something truly beautiful, one must have the courage to amputate something of oneself..."
Giuliano Serafini
Curator of the exhibition
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