Opera Artis, Opera immortalitatis
(για ελληνικά πατήστε εδώ)
The Art of Man reflects the perpetual struggle of all of his generations to beat death. Death causes such inspiration that makes man take countermeasures; and, among other things, Man invented art as a weapon that, although earthly, stands immortal so as to describe the greatness and the tragedy of mankind. In essence, art is nothing more than the expression of human distress to overcome the sadness, the fear and pessimism of mankind’s destiny which has been defined equitable for all people, kings and lay people, rich and poor. Even the God of Man is not exempted from this relentless law.
And of course, Art does not come as a cheap consolation to the inherent tragedy of human beings. Art sets its own laws, those laws which give a breath of immortality to the artwork. The first and inviolable law wants the problem of death to be a life thesis and dissertation, image and color, line and stanza, marble and chisel. And art has been for earth’s great civilizations what religion has been for other cultures. Art gave reason to man’s unreasonable existence. It captured and described the eternal truths, attempted to close within it the knowledge or the struggle of man to conquer the knowledge of why, how and what. And to whomever artist attempted to respond, lawfully, in this questions, Art gave him immortality as an eternal present. When El Greco depicted the divine agony of cruciform sacrifice, when he portrayed the Tantalus’ struggle to overcome himself, at that time all the colors and lines he drew gave immortality to his work, but at the same time his art made all people immortal.
Every visual art follows the same artistic laws. By the way of example besides painting and sculpture, the newborn art of photography adheres to the same laws, which make the instant eternal and they also make people, situations and emotions immortal. Finally, as people will be sinking into nothingness, humanity will continuously produce new art forms that will be subordinate to Art’s eternal laws, those laws which will yet give eternity to the artist and his creations. And death will no longer be so dreadful, so invincible...
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Dimitris Kalogiannis studied Greek Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UOA). He also received two Master’s of Arts degrees and he holds a PhD from this university in the field of Organisation and Management of Education. He works as a teacher of Greek literature at Arsakeia-Tositseia senior high schools and teaches in Master’s courses of UOA and University of Peireus.
His first encounter with Art took place on an academic level through Literature and its theories. However, the decoding of Art and a complete comprehension of it as a social product dictated its meticulous typological consideration. In this way, what had previously been pure academicism gradually turned into a journey into time, a dive in the human soul, a therapeutic self-psychoanalysis from the violent coercion of love and ultimate loss.
*edited in english by Adamantia Zafiropoulou
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