Andrew Antoniou
' Stagecraft '
' Stagecraft '
“Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.”
Eugene Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
“Art,” is a meeting place in which human beings commune at a level that ordinary language and sign systems do not allow.” Marcel Proust.
We have in our mind within our consciousness access to to a powerful other world. A place where dreams / myths/ poetry belief and lunacy reside, constantly overlapping each other to form an alternative narrative One where we are undefined .
This is as JF Martel , Canadian philosopher once named it the ‘imaginal world’. Art makes manifest this imaginal world without explanation or deconstruction. Art call us out of the ordinary and asks us to abandon our faith in the known.
He once stated “True Art questions rather than provide answers, as opposed to artifice, it unsettles our consciousness rather than re-enforces our assumed view of the world. Art calls us out of utilitarian mental space into mystery, into acknowledging that we are in the presence of our own unknowability, our wonder and fear at forces greater than ourselves. “ I believe it transforms our remembered history into our personal mythology.
In my work I make no directive to tell the viewer how to feel , what to believe or even to provide a specific context. Viewing paintings comes with a responsibility of dispensing with likes and preferences. It should not be commodified to accomodate taste in this age of matching the work to the curtains.
These images you see before you are born of me but they have a lineage that precedes me and will eventually survive me. They are images that have been in incubation constantly since my first picture book, my first marks on the page , They have been ever changing beneath the surface of consciousness waiting for the moment to find the right character and costume, set and prop within which to be able to take the stage. My work allows me to move the boundary fence between memory, dream and myth. Is it remembered or imagined ? Is it stolen or is it a gift. No matter it will write it’s own reality. It is a montage of thoughts and images that can only find a fit when the time of coalescing is right?
Within my sensibility a landscape can become a stage set. Characters become archetypes and signs become symbols. An act becomes the ritual. The objects within the painting can become sacred to the point of becoming objects of worship. The cast is one that could be classified as self absorbed. They are in the act of and this one act defines their presence. They defy gravity and space and they rarely engage with the viewer. It is the opposite of portraiture. They can only appear as they wish to be. Then ultimately the unspoken within the image becomes the narrative. redolent with meaning. for as we know there are no words to describe the music of meaning.
From an early age I was transfixed and ultimately transformed by the theatrical space with a yearly visit to the panto and with the human landscape of a shadowy 1950’s London . In this populous city of London, theatre was woven through it’s everyday. It’s history providing a catalogue of human dramas sublime and cruel, Dickens and Blake. Hogarth & Edward Burra ,Jack the Ripper and Ray Davies With this as a backdrop to my early life the more immediate experience of my greek upbringing contrasted by bringing stories of the ancient myths These are the myths of seafaring heroes on a quest for the ultimate prize , strange monsters and sirens, serpents and glittering fleeces. Watchful goddesses and vengeful gods. Labours, trials and quests. Contrast this with a more everyday setting where within the family home the images of icons, illustrations in my first greek language grammar book and strange text written across the weekly Cypriot newspaper.
The ancient greeks gave us the gift of theatre as a way of seeing ourselves as they see us. We sit in the gods after all !. We watch people struggling with their mortality, their class , questioning their existence (Alas poor Yorrick ) betraying their love , becoming obsessed with power to the point of murder or reaching out to their divine inspiration .
My influences range across the centuries from Bosch to Breugel from Samuel Beckett the playwright to Max Beckmann, Goya to Stanley Spencer and Lewis Carroll, Bob Dylan, William Shakespeare and Milan Kundera, Coleridge or Alan Ginsburg . The Black Theatre of Prague , The Moscow State Circus All these influences and more had their place in my internal life and they became strands that I as an individual had woven into my own tapestry of images. We appropriate what is appropriate. Picasso insisted that you should not borrow images from other artists but steal them. Make them yours and live with their blessings and their curses.
I wanted the characters in my work to be lifted from the page with the unbearable lightness of being. Beyond human. Part divine, part animal , part human.
Art for me is the real magic. It is not the antithesis of reason but the synthesis of reason and magic. Not illusion for the sake of tricking our perception but the creation of another reality to transform our perception rather than deceive our senses.
The dreamscape is a focus for me, it is, after all, one that we inhabit everyday of our lives. It is where the language of the unseen speaks through images that do not belong to reason. It is the reality of the other place. One which seeks to remind us that there is more than this and are we looking closely ? After all science can answer all of the questions. When ? How ? Where ? But not the why question that dreams seem to imply. Art cannot answer that question either. But it can repose the question and make it an open one.
I wanted to create these realities because I knew they existed within me . I read Carl Jung and studied the language of symbols .
It has been an area of fascination for me for over 40 years.With the course work of my school aside with its study of landscape drawing figure painting etc. ,and invaluable though they were, I knew that this had to be only a start point for what was to come. How do I create works where the subjects are invisible ? Representing the external world without reference to the inner world was not an option. I wanted a different sense of place and time. One that matched the dreamscape reality One where the characters in my work would be lifted from the page with that unbearable lightness of being.
The artist that inspired me at art school had one overriding quality. That of mystery. For what else other than a sense of mystery can we feel curiosity or fascination. What else can keep our eyes searching the 2 dimensional space that we behold ? In this age we conspire against mystery . Art is not an Agatha Christie novel where Hercule Poirot gathers all in the drawing room in the final scene and solves the mystery. “ I knew it was the chauffeur !!
It is more of a Raymond Chandler novel where we don’t find out who did it or why but we are left with a valuable collection of questions and mysteries.
We are uncomfortable without an explanation. I have watched people over the years struggle to explain work to themselves . With exposure and familiarity wonder is in short supply. Even at the viewing platforms at the Grand Canyon you can look up at a flat screen digitalised pictures of the canyon and feel comfortable that your view has been framed for you. You don’t even have to cast your eyes across this 18 mile wide vista of space.
The picture plane is a real space and we can wonder at that . It is a space that I feel that I am able to step into when I work. I try to imagine what the people in each position within the painting or drawing are seeing . I try to stand where they stand looking from the picture plane out to the room in which we stand.
When I do not feel that space I believe I am simply making pictures.
I hope while you are in this virtual space that you take time to engage with the 'why' without having an answer pending. It is the best way to keep your sense of mystery and ,more importantly , the painting alive.
Thank you
Andrew Antoniou
We have in our mind within our consciousness access to to a powerful other world. A place where dreams / myths/ poetry belief and lunacy reside, constantly overlapping each other to form an alternative narrative One where we are undefined .
This is as JF Martel , Canadian philosopher once named it the ‘imaginal world’. Art makes manifest this imaginal world without explanation or deconstruction. Art call us out of the ordinary and asks us to abandon our faith in the known.
He once stated “True Art questions rather than provide answers, as opposed to artifice, it unsettles our consciousness rather than re-enforces our assumed view of the world. Art calls us out of utilitarian mental space into mystery, into acknowledging that we are in the presence of our own unknowability, our wonder and fear at forces greater than ourselves. “ I believe it transforms our remembered history into our personal mythology.
In my work I make no directive to tell the viewer how to feel , what to believe or even to provide a specific context. Viewing paintings comes with a responsibility of dispensing with likes and preferences. It should not be commodified to accomodate taste in this age of matching the work to the curtains.
These images you see before you are born of me but they have a lineage that precedes me and will eventually survive me. They are images that have been in incubation constantly since my first picture book, my first marks on the page , They have been ever changing beneath the surface of consciousness waiting for the moment to find the right character and costume, set and prop within which to be able to take the stage. My work allows me to move the boundary fence between memory, dream and myth. Is it remembered or imagined ? Is it stolen or is it a gift. No matter it will write it’s own reality. It is a montage of thoughts and images that can only find a fit when the time of coalescing is right?
Within my sensibility a landscape can become a stage set. Characters become archetypes and signs become symbols. An act becomes the ritual. The objects within the painting can become sacred to the point of becoming objects of worship. The cast is one that could be classified as self absorbed. They are in the act of and this one act defines their presence. They defy gravity and space and they rarely engage with the viewer. It is the opposite of portraiture. They can only appear as they wish to be. Then ultimately the unspoken within the image becomes the narrative. redolent with meaning. for as we know there are no words to describe the music of meaning.
From an early age I was transfixed and ultimately transformed by the theatrical space with a yearly visit to the panto and with the human landscape of a shadowy 1950’s London . In this populous city of London, theatre was woven through it’s everyday. It’s history providing a catalogue of human dramas sublime and cruel, Dickens and Blake. Hogarth & Edward Burra ,Jack the Ripper and Ray Davies With this as a backdrop to my early life the more immediate experience of my greek upbringing contrasted by bringing stories of the ancient myths These are the myths of seafaring heroes on a quest for the ultimate prize , strange monsters and sirens, serpents and glittering fleeces. Watchful goddesses and vengeful gods. Labours, trials and quests. Contrast this with a more everyday setting where within the family home the images of icons, illustrations in my first greek language grammar book and strange text written across the weekly Cypriot newspaper.
The ancient greeks gave us the gift of theatre as a way of seeing ourselves as they see us. We sit in the gods after all !. We watch people struggling with their mortality, their class , questioning their existence (Alas poor Yorrick ) betraying their love , becoming obsessed with power to the point of murder or reaching out to their divine inspiration .
My influences range across the centuries from Bosch to Breugel from Samuel Beckett the playwright to Max Beckmann, Goya to Stanley Spencer and Lewis Carroll, Bob Dylan, William Shakespeare and Milan Kundera, Coleridge or Alan Ginsburg . The Black Theatre of Prague , The Moscow State Circus All these influences and more had their place in my internal life and they became strands that I as an individual had woven into my own tapestry of images. We appropriate what is appropriate. Picasso insisted that you should not borrow images from other artists but steal them. Make them yours and live with their blessings and their curses.
I wanted the characters in my work to be lifted from the page with the unbearable lightness of being. Beyond human. Part divine, part animal , part human.
Art for me is the real magic. It is not the antithesis of reason but the synthesis of reason and magic. Not illusion for the sake of tricking our perception but the creation of another reality to transform our perception rather than deceive our senses.
The dreamscape is a focus for me, it is, after all, one that we inhabit everyday of our lives. It is where the language of the unseen speaks through images that do not belong to reason. It is the reality of the other place. One which seeks to remind us that there is more than this and are we looking closely ? After all science can answer all of the questions. When ? How ? Where ? But not the why question that dreams seem to imply. Art cannot answer that question either. But it can repose the question and make it an open one.
I wanted to create these realities because I knew they existed within me . I read Carl Jung and studied the language of symbols .
It has been an area of fascination for me for over 40 years.With the course work of my school aside with its study of landscape drawing figure painting etc. ,and invaluable though they were, I knew that this had to be only a start point for what was to come. How do I create works where the subjects are invisible ? Representing the external world without reference to the inner world was not an option. I wanted a different sense of place and time. One that matched the dreamscape reality One where the characters in my work would be lifted from the page with that unbearable lightness of being.
The artist that inspired me at art school had one overriding quality. That of mystery. For what else other than a sense of mystery can we feel curiosity or fascination. What else can keep our eyes searching the 2 dimensional space that we behold ? In this age we conspire against mystery . Art is not an Agatha Christie novel where Hercule Poirot gathers all in the drawing room in the final scene and solves the mystery. “ I knew it was the chauffeur !!
It is more of a Raymond Chandler novel where we don’t find out who did it or why but we are left with a valuable collection of questions and mysteries.
We are uncomfortable without an explanation. I have watched people over the years struggle to explain work to themselves . With exposure and familiarity wonder is in short supply. Even at the viewing platforms at the Grand Canyon you can look up at a flat screen digitalised pictures of the canyon and feel comfortable that your view has been framed for you. You don’t even have to cast your eyes across this 18 mile wide vista of space.
The picture plane is a real space and we can wonder at that . It is a space that I feel that I am able to step into when I work. I try to imagine what the people in each position within the painting or drawing are seeing . I try to stand where they stand looking from the picture plane out to the room in which we stand.
When I do not feel that space I believe I am simply making pictures.
I hope while you are in this virtual space that you take time to engage with the 'why' without having an answer pending. It is the best way to keep your sense of mystery and ,more importantly , the painting alive.
Thank you
Andrew Antoniou
