International Artist Gregory Christeas at the “Cultural Olympiad Athens 2004”
Written by Leonteios Petmezas
On Wednesday, February 4, 2004, at 8 p.m., the new exhibition titled “Art and Freedom” by internationally acclaimed artist Gregory Christeas will be inaugurated. The exhibition is under the auspices of the Ministry of Development and the Greek National Tourism Organization. The Minister of Progress Akis Tsohatzopoulos and the President of the Greek National Tourism Organization, Mr. Nikos Diamadis, will be attending the ceremony of the largest art show in the Cultural Olympiad Athens 2004, which will take place at the old Hellenikon airport on Vouliagmenis Avenue.
The supreme art of the inspired creator honors a group of freedom fighters who assisted in the overthrow of the dictatorship in Greece through this exceptional artistic expression.
In honor of this group, Christeas has donated 12,000 lithographs to charitable foundations worldwide through the Internet. The emotional, minimalist, and conceptual representation, using the abstract technique, conveys messages, inner thoughts of the soul, experiences, emotions, and impressions worthy of being a gift to the consciousness of each viewer, each Greek.
For over forty years, he undoubtedly possesses a seal of donation that magically reassembles pioneering objects, marking several interesting things. Everyday reality, following the direct image of writing, brings knowledgeable viewers closer to the inner world of revelations. It is the region where meanings are released, internal balances are established, and paths of consciousness are undertaken that indelibly project the universal view of a transformation into an entity and the resilience of a political element. Because Christeas’ art is directly political, especially in this latest presentation. However, he intentionally preserves and defines politics within the framework of a dignified communicative dialogue. Nevertheless, he dares an eternal transcendence in the structure of the artistic language, which simultaneously redefines determination in content. He subtly suggests a direct reflection more complex than any previous inspiration, characterized by refined depth and functional coherence in development.
Through the brilliance of self-revelation, Christeas moves among forms with energy and expressiveness, placing colors as companions in the transformative mechanism emitted by rich psyche and emotional wealth. He stands reverently before the shelter of experiences, memories, struggles, with refined memory, against the warmth that diffuses, presenting a mysterious metaphysical anticipation. The space hosting abstract themes, possessing visual substance, gradually and gradually forms combinations reminiscent of the classical Renaissance approach to emotional radiation. The richness of Christeas’ writing, regarding the past, the present, and the future, brings redemption and purification,
metamorphosis, and true volumetric representation, with geometric strictness. He dislodges lyricism, cultivates realistic convention, and certainly emphasizes the vertical dynamics, diagonal dimension of aspiration as an indication of exit and simultaneous escape. The expanded fields from the artist’s dreamlike visionary field, by no means enigmatic, predispose for the maintenance of feasibility. The shadings, in this case, appear reductionist, and polysemous.
Christeas’ thematic approach brings to life pillars of passage into color, which ally with monumental, historical, anti-militaristic, and ultimately, activist routes. They bring existential concerns to us with a strong emotional involvement. We encounter deep metric requests from early memory that, being in an eleventh-hour settlement landscape, receives the eerie light from the dominion of justice, from spring sources that elongate, assuming a dominant role and semantic size.
The fighter for Democracy, Gregory Christeas, invites us to a symposium of dialogue, intensity, gradations, determinations, deviations, subterranean reformation, pursuits, endogenous balances, and inner references. Specific paintings in his exhibition are personally dedicated, and some of them bear the names of active fighters. Linking art with politics, Christeas, beyond the pretexts of appearances of the visible, moves into the metaphysical serenity that surpasses utopia, nurtures the fateful and the random, which, through the idol imagery, exposes the authoritative light, upgrading and reassigning correspondences, associations, and gestures of the moment, which become contemplative horizons and animation.
Leonteios Petmezas is an Art Historian and Exhibition Curator.