Aristotelis Tzakos

Efi Strouza, 1991

The Riddle of a Landscape

The first encounter with the work of an artist may be compared to the foreword to a book, whose unfolding and end have not yet been designed. Furthermore, when one first sees a work of art, the communication is established through an expressive punctuation code, that may range from a full stop to a comma, a question mark or an exclamation mark ...

The work of an artist is not always the finished image of a story. There are, naturally, works that, by their language, express clearly their intention and aim, like the narration of the beginning and the end of a story. ln these cases, the full stop is the appropriate punctuation mark. In parallel, there are works whose language hints at an enigmatical world, even if their syntactic structure is simple and clear.

The painting of Aristotelis Tzakos carries in it this riddle. With simple constituents, with clear lines, colours and plans, he brings the viewer face to face with a landscape that is both schematic and enigmatical. Although the composition is apparently simple and plain, in reality it creates an interrogative image. The riddle is expressed in simple words, in the schematic image of a simple landscape, but manages to transport automatically the viewer to the space that opens after the first optical perception, to the story hidden after the first reading of a foreword. Thus, by an innocent trick, the viewer is led to share the artist's interrogative attitude towards painting itself, as concept and action. An attitude which prescribes an evolving relationship between the artist and his object, without dogmatically predetermining its evolution. It is an image constructed with the purpose of ensnaring the pleasure of the senses into an act of intellectual elaboration. I would say that, in essence, it exists not in order to carry something to the outside, but in order to turn optical perception to the investigation of the nature of the pictorial language.

It is not by chance that Tzakos choses as a constant theme of his compositions the motif of a natural landscape. At a second look at the pictorial space he composes, this choice is indicative of the w a y followed in the analysis and restructuring of the artistic language through the investigation of some constant interrogation points, that revert to the artist's problematique, in particular during his course through the twentieth century.

From the beginning of this century until today painting has developed in general on an entirely new base of organization of pictorial space, which came as a natural result after the various styles and the new systems of composition values that had been suggested since the middle of the 19th century. The new optical perception of the objective world projected by impressionism and, later on, by post-impressionist research transferred the centre of gravity from the exercise and variation of the classical pictorial values and the given ways of observation of nature, to the contemplatίon of the relationship between object and language. The subsequent systematic contemplation of painting as an intermediate point between the objective and subjective world has given the artist the role of a person who can change the meaning of everything through the structure of language itself and not through the symbolism of the iconographical repertory. Painting is permanently established by the father of modern art, Cezanne, as the place of optical analysis and investigation of the relationship between the natural and theoretical world.

Cezanne pointed out that "In art everything is theory, that evolves and is applied in contact with nature.” And he chose as the main object of observation of this relationship nature, which will remain the essential point of reference in almost all the transformations that will be created by the language of art , in the different visions of the world he proposed. In the course of time, we see this point remain the persistent point of reference for many great figures of art and be revealed as the secret point of a hidden primary structure. But even in the history of art , the search for the primary structures of space has been a characteristic of the work of those who transformed from time to lime the inherited techniques of figurative art into a vision of the basic structures of the world from Giotto, Uccello and Piero della Francesca to Poussin.

Thus a constant search for the apocryphal dimension of the objective world leads the artist , during different periods, to a search for the primary structures of language.

In modem art this search is repeatedly emphasized. This is done in a poetical manner by Klee , who looks for the original point, a dot in space, that can give rise to everything, the line, the plans and colours, with the purpose of revealing once again their one-dimensional substance, their original status in "the remote point of origin of creation." Kandinsky also starts in the same direction, ever since his first works, using the simplest shapes that might render the "internal echo" of the landscape.

The multiple returns to this topic throughout this century reach from Malevic to Breton and to the post -war period , and acquire universal importance. The search for the hidden truth echoes as the essential ideal in the mystical search of American abstract painting, while art as a manner of representing the "absolute " gives shape to the thought of Morris and Smith. The extreme statement of art as the locus of the absolute and one-dimensional, as concepts, is given by conceptual art, that reaches up to the point of denuding the pictorial language of any metaphorical and aesthetical item and content. Ad Reinhardt used to say, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, that "The words in art are words, the letters are letters, red is red, yellow is yellow, dark grey is not dark grey,” to conclude that "art for art is art, the end of art is art from the point of view of art, the end of art is not the end.”

Aristotelis Tzakos knows this motive in all its echoes , and it has touched his own sensibility. He also knows that the question remains open and has understood that the pointing out of the question , at any lime, is not supported by the adoption of one of the languages in which it has already been formulated , but by the originality of thought that will ask the question once again and of the language that will express it. The long search of Tzakos revolves around the creation of a personal style that will transfer this motive, in a persuasive way, into a personal search. Therefore he does not adopt one of the languages (in the form of a specific tried style) that were used in the treatment of this riddle but, on the contrary, he tries to render the image of the theoretical bases that supported the search for restructuring through a simple, almost primitively childish language. The landscapes of Aristotelis Tzakos look like a “reconstruction” of the intersection between a natural and a theoretical world. The constituents of his  Iandscapes are colour and shape in their essential state, in other words nature and intellectual construction reconstructed in their most schematlc forms, in order to denote the meaning of the space between these two poles, a space that echoes the existence of an absolute dimension, uninfluenced by the conflicts of the opposites, and non-explanatory. Tzakos respects the existence of an objective reality. He does not deny it, but at the same time , through the specific picture by which he represents it, thanks to the particularly careful use of colour and shape, he reminds by his work the existence of another potential communication level. The one-dimensional nature of Tzakos' spaces reminds us of the utopian ideal of this century that has been emphasized so widely and thoroughly and which was, in the words of Levi-Strauss, the search for a system of points arranged in a unique level. Or, in the words of Malevic, an effort to reach the point where language has no reason to describe the "upper " and “lower”, since "the structure of a sphere ignores the ‘upper' and ‘lower'."

Strange as it may seem, the multiplicity of forms and values, that was so enthusiastically supported in the last decade, when analysed only refers to the discovery of the concept of an anti-dogmatical but absolute point of reference. Space is broken into multiple molecules to reveal the absolute presence of a one-dimensional space between the object and the subject. This sectioning of space is as enigmatical as the ideal looked for in this century. And it is as remote as the ideal that is transformed into utopia every time man tries to approach it. Until today , it remains remote and out of reach and returns from time to time like a dream in order to give us hope. Aristotelis Tzakos, with his enigmatical landscapes, carries us, in a simple but absolute manner, into this dream.

EFI STROUZA. 1991