Athanasios Michos may have not trained as an artist, even though he has studied iconography, he studied to be an accountant and joined the bank, regardless, he has been making images all his life.
From banking to brushstrokes: A self-taught discipline
The autodidact, has studied Byzantine iconography, and that forms part of his theoretical foundation. Along with a forceful physicality that fills his canvases, there is discipline based on observation and thought.
“For me drawing has rules, although I don’t like rules… even the most abstract art must have rules,” Michos says
His solo exhibition Aurum Figura 79 at the European Centre—Contemporary Space Athens at Mitropoleos 74, features a series of paintings, which are austere yet radiant as if he has found a way to pool the Attic light that he is constantly referencing in his conversation, directly onto his canvases.
“Colours don’t exist, all colour is light, if colour did exist, every time we put our hands in the ocean they would come out blue.”
Anonymous figures, universal emotions
His characters are semi-abstract, they rely on bold line, shape, and blocks of colour, and lack individuality.
“My characters do not have faces, hands or gender because I’m interested in the anthropos, this is basic, because we’re all human and ideally our individual features are irrelevant,” says Michos.
This anonymity allows viewers a freedom expression he allows himself.
“I respect my viewer, I have to think about the person who looks at it, so I don’t give them everything, I let them do part of the work.”
Freedom of expression is key for Michos, “because it is that which takes you to the next level: colour and shape can provide a wider range of stimuli in order to create an organic change of thought and action”
His characters are semi-abstract; they rely on bold lines, shape, and blocks of colour, and lack individuality. Photo: Facebook
Like his human forms, his landscapes have an anonymity about them. Through the interplay of land, sea and the familiar religious tropes, they seem set on Greek islands. Michos plays with colour and geometry to suggest a culture without falling into the whitewashed church cliché, because of the strength and spontaneity of his brush strokes.
There is nothing clinical about his paintings, or a lack of emotion because as he says “art can only be convincing when the artist is unafraid to reveal their feelings”.
For Michos a technically perfect image devoid of feeling is “dead”, while a spontaneous drawing, full of implication and insinuation, “however imperfect, is unforgettable”.
Set against land and sea, his works evoke Greek islands through colour and geometry, sidestepping cliché with bold, spontaneous brushwork. Photo: KO
Light and the power of gold
Michos may not have attended art school, he studied iconography, and it shows in his palette, in the universality of the shapes, as if he is following some arcane iconographic tradition. Like a Byzantine icon, the subject is not placed in a physical setting; there are no context clues. In his latest exhibition the backgrounds range from bright gold to warm orange, burning the surface of the canvas. The figures reclining, or sitting, or squatting, or dancing, or leaping, carry that same intensity in their movements, as if the heat of the colour and the energy exuded by the subject burn at the same intensity.
His figures are often ambiguously portrayed, yet they are unambiguous in their intent, and those images of human relationships are the least ambiguous of all. Couples sit together, so relaxed in each other’s auras that they could be two halves of Plato’s whole, having found their missing half in each other. Those canvases are particularly moving, evoking not only recognition in the observer, but perhaps too, a longing for something lost, or yet to be attained.
His paintings reject clinical detachment, embracing emotion—”art is convincing only when the artist is unafraid to reveal their feelings.” Photo: KO
Michos’s own physicality is a misleading. He is a large man, although he moves with the same deft lightness of being that he brings to his work. When I suggested as much to him, he was a bit discombobulated, pointing to an undertone of the masculine sensibility, “My physicality is not the same as my output… that’s because we are a complex assortment of ourselves”.
Michos’s work, for all its sparseness, for all its surface simplicity, therev is complexity lurking beneath the surface. The colours, the shapes, the poses, are not there to bedazzle the viewer, or confuse them or fool them. There are no “tricks of the light” in his work. He is not intending to use them to obfuscate or deceive, but rather to guide them, “and through common feelings to inspire them and bring them closer”.
His semi-abstract figures are defined by bold lines, strong shapes, and blocks of colour, deliberately stripped of individual identity. Photo: KO
*Kiriaki Orfanos is a culture and arts writer, and researcher, based in Sydney, now travelling Europe, and regular contributor to Neos Kosmos.