The exhibition entitled “Kythira, the distant and desirable ideal!”, with five artists permanently or periodically residing in Kythira and associated with the “follow Your Art” Gallery in Kapsali, Kythira, opens on Thursday, December 1, 7.00-10.00 m.m.

The Sea of Kythira, according to Hesiod, is the birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite. The myth of its creation is well known, and it contains intense violence. The goddess of Love, therefore, was born from the blood and foam of the sea, in Kythira and then traveled on the seashell to Cyprus.

Kythira as a place and landscape was associated primarily with the utopian, the dreamy, the beautiful but also the idyllic, but also the repulsive and tragically high, aesthetic qualities that are particularly expressed in the Renaissance and modern landscape and mythographic painting, but also in the literary and poetic tradition. […]

The myth of Aphrodite and the island of Kythira occupied many artists over the centuries, such as the painter Jean Antoine Watteau. Poets such as Charles Baudelaire and lately Theodore Angelopoulos with his film journey to Kythira.

A journey symbol of deeper personal feelings, visions, values and existential searches.

The five artists of the exhibition participate each with their own look and thought.

Angelos Antonopoulos plays with the boundaries between sculpture and painting and creates a personal narrative-installation, with heterogeneous objects. But mainly it removes the objects it uses from their environment, removes their gender, neutralizes them, processes them, and integrates them into new conditions and relationships. Creating a surreal effect as many times are our dreams and visions.

Stefanos Rokos the works “in the garden” (2022) and ” 3.15 p.m.”, (2017) are the depiction of two distinct moments of the summer season, in which, under the light of the sun and the moon, and through discussions between the members of a group, the attempt is made to approach the ideal, or the realization of its futility.

John Stathatos is inspired by the magical gardens of the Scottish multi-talented artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), and specifically by “Little Sparta”, the garden he created on the barren slopes of southern Scotland . This garden, which belongs to the great tradition of the allegorical gardens of the Renaissance, places poetic and sculptural elements in a perpetual relationship with the natural and artificial landscape. Works made by a range of his collaborators and inspired by the pre-Socratic, by the leaders of the French Revolution, by the history of art.

Georgia Tseri. Archetypal patterns, allegories, symbolisms emerge as human beings, solitary figures seeking truth, myth, values and utopias.

Manolis Charos was based on Baudelaire’s poem “journey to Kythera”

… Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages,

Comme un ange enivré d’un soleil radieux….

(under the clear sky rolled the ship

like an angel drunk of sun shining).

in order to attempt his own painting journey in Kythira, a journey of search, mental and emotional, at the same time essential.

Opening: Thursday 01/12/2022, 7-10 m.m.

Duration: until 14/01/2023

Opening hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 14:00 – 20:00 & Saturday 12:00 – 16: 00