Translator

BRIAN CLEARY

ELIAS PASSISSIS  (1944-2002)

He was born in Messolongi. His secondary education was at the Palamaikos School and since 1966, he has lived and worked in Athens. He studied graphic arts in Athens and has worked as art director for a number of important advertising companies. Since 1970, he has been involved in the architectural design of cultural and commercial exhibitions as well as the planning and organisation of museum interiors. He has designed archaeological exhibitions for the Ministry of Culture in Athens, Venice, Bruxelles, Amversa, Lisbon, Dallas in the U.S., London, Canada and elsewhere. From 1969 until the present, he has been artistic supervisor for the annual publications of Architecture and Design in Greece.

He has designed the presentation of exhibits at the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes, the Folkloric Museum of Ierapetra and the Odoiporiki in Athens, a permanent exhibition and reconstruction of neoclassical Athens in the Papadopoulos Building of the Melina Mercouri Cultural Centre, as well as the Athens Metro displays at Syntagma, Panepistimio, Dafni and elsewhere.

His first official appearance, and winning an award, was with his work, K. Palamas at Parnassos, in 1969, which was donated to the Museum of the Sacred City of Messolongi. He then took part and gained an award in the Panhellenic Exhibitions in 1973 and 1975. He has had one-man exhibitions in Athens (Ora Gallery, 1975 and 1983), Thessaloniki (Pansellinos Gallery, 1976), and Paris (Galerie Mouffe, 1977). He has also taken part in exhibitions with other artists both in Greece and abroad (Athens 1969, 1970, 1977, 1978, 1982, Iraklion 1980, Agrinion 1992, Rhodes 1993, Todi, Italy 1985, 1986). He also took part in an exhibition of Pictures in Greek Art at Zappeion in 1979 and the Exhibition of Contemporary Painters, organised by the National Gallery with works from its own collection in Athens, in 1987, and in Bruxelles, in1988. As part of a visiting exhibition of works by various artists from the Vorre Museum collection, his work was exhibited in Chicago (1985), Ontario (1986), Washington (1986), Victoria, Canada (1987), Toronto (1987), Ottawa (1988), Sackville (1988), New Jersey (1989), Los Angeles (1989) and Seattle (1990).

His works are to be found in the National Gallery, the Vorre Museum, the Art Gallery of the Society for Macedonian Studies, the K. Palamas Museum, the H and S Moshandreou Museum and in private collections both in Greece and Abroad.

 

 

TEXTS

on the painting of

Elias Passissis

 

An hymn to life

By Demetris Yatropoulos (2002)

Elias Passissis is an artist ‘to the hilt’ to recall Seferis when he characterised Nikos Gavriel Nentzekis as literature to the hilt. In other words, he participates in the miracle of art as a celebrant and not as one of its faithful observers

That is where one begins all discussion related to his work. To gain an accessible approach to his work, we need to overturn classical rules and codes of communications because, while it may seem an oxymoron, there does exist an inaccessible approach. And this is exactly what one senses when viewing his pictures. One perceives but not necessarily understands! Between being overwhelmed and understanding, people appreciate the work without needing to move to the next level where lies a carefully contrived rejection of the formal relationship between viewer and picture, which to some is perhaps displeasing!

For example, he does not compose a painting as such, but rather, creates by adding! And there is an enormous difference. By the manner with which he manipulates light and gives balance with his shadows, he works very closely and realistically with what is offered by Nature, the nature of things and to a far lesser extent that suggested by society. So, for example, the importance of shadow in his work is not to use it to excess, thus expressionistically providing us directly with poster-like symbolism, which even the great painters flirt with in art decoraratif, but yet, he does not render the shadow in subordination to the object, as some ‘accompanying’ element. So here, we can refer to a creative restructuring of shadow, a synthesis by addition manipulating the relationship between light and shade for us on a clearly philosophical plane: the shadow of Life is Death. Very simply and clearly, we find that for Passissis, decay and dilapidation are not the road to death, but rather, in another form, the dispassionate course of life, creatively being added to. Yet even in this he avoids the trap awaiting the pessimist who flirts with decay and dilapidation. Throughout his work is a hymn to life; to life hidden within its own negation, to life on a waiting list of transient nothingness.

Before one of Elias’ pictures, I feel I am travelling within it until finally it passes into me, there to travel around. And that is not because I am a poet looking for something in the work, but because the poetry of the work finds me, existentially joining me to the work. With justification, I can give witness that, quite directly, Passissis’ work is poetic!

For here, the absolute perseverance with recording sacred details, the painstaking consideration of the least, and so, particular element – “the hint of the shirt being eroded by the wind” to recall Elytis – work, not only as proof of an exquisite mastery worthy of the great classical painters, but more especially, of an exacting thanksgiving for the gift of life.

Beyond this, his work can be discussed in conventional terms, however, this can be left for others to do both more lucidly and aptly than myself.

I am and shall remain in holy surprise at the discovery created in me, not at what is apparent, but what is hidden. A determination to cherish the reality surrounding us.

Obviously, so as to heal it!

Elias Passissis, A City Elegist

By Thomas Gorpas

Elias Passissis is a painter of the city. He is also, I believe, the only hyperrealist (and not surrealist) painter in Greece. He was clearly driven to this post-war trend almost unknown in Greece by graphic arts, which acted as its beacon, but of no less importance was his crossing over from a surrealism laced with futurism. In the 1973 Panhellenic, his “Victim”-foot amazed and caused discussion.

The deserted buildings (frames) or his immobilised cars and the garbage-elegies to an Athens that now actually lives in its own wastelands and rubbish dumps.

Passissis’ world, a very vocal silence, a stillness ready to explode, are what are seen by an artist who persists in being at once sensitive and aggressive: disuse and dilapidation, death by unknown causes, terror and bitterness from and for a society more than ever forgetting to live and to die.

So, the car (and any engine) is rightly the principal symbol for such painting, certainly at those moments it blindingly conveys its own demystification. Also, the colours are industrial, dull and of rust – of decomposition – yet they hold in their heart something of the Greek blue, or when intense, of advertisements and consumption… fittingly.

The Painting of Elias Passissis

By A.G. Xides

A work needs to have a lot of character and a deal of quality to angle your attention at the flea market of the 13^th Panhellenic Exhibition. It was there that I saw a work by Passissis, the only one he had exhibited. It was a full on rendition of a crashed car’s front end, with open bonnet and gutted engine. Amid the emptiness and arrogance of the other exhibits you passed by with a mixture of embarrassment and boredom, this work was a spot of relief and enjoyment, and yet its theme was not particularly attractive or original. These days, the subject was such a commonplace, just any old battered, disused car, ready for scrap.

Passissis’ first one-man exhibition came a little later, and my impression that this was a painter worth following was confirmed. Empirically, and without theory, he was approaching a realistic manner of expression his well-schooled contemporaries at the time in Germany and England had discovered and called neo-realist. The significance of Passissis’ work consists exactly in the fact that, completely self-taught, and quite young, he had come to one of the most important trends in the world’s present-day art. This explains why his works exude a compelling air of authenticity and sincerity. His expression in this particular manner stems from a driving physical need.

He was born in 1944, in Messolongi, and lived his first twenty years by the inlet there. He came to Athens in 1964 and has worked as a graphic artist for one of the capital’s largest advertising companies contributing completely anonymously to their success. He began to feel his ‘concerns’ as he calls them in 1969-70, and so, gradually and in parallel with his entirely graphic gouache renditions of objects and places advertised by the company, with much sensitivity, he travelled down the road that, in sheer dialectic fashion, led him to authenticating the fate of Messolongi homes for example in tumbledown buildings, of brand new everyday objects in a pile of slowly disintegrating, decaying rubbish, which he depicts today. This road is travelled without expressionism, without sensationalism, without brutality or nostalgia. In the best sense of neo-realism, Passissis’ works are the result of a calmly, sensitively unrelenting pragmatism, yet, of a somehow, dispassionate attestation.

Perhaps, when viewing the works of Passissis, the sight of perfectly natural collapse and dilapidation does evoke within us feelings of nostalgia or sadness, even though discarded cartons of Ajax or old tyres are not exactly the reliquary to bring on tears of grief, however, this is not the intention of the painter. These feelings are subordinated by the technical perfection with which the works are executed – possibly his principal gain from years as a graphic artist. The poetic aesthetic element stemming from this perfection may be, as with Flemish still lifes, attributable to the pile of rubbish not being the faithful depiction of an actual pile, but a composition of fragments of plans and observations, brought together in the studio. They thus take on the texture of a valid reality which would be surreal if the juxtaposition of objects were not clearly natural as in an actual car falling to pieces, or of the walls of a house peeling with time.

It is this that transforms the works of Passissis into painting rather than just lifeless, photographic representations. And it is this which shows the artist the direction in which he must persist.

July, 1976  A.G. Xides

True passion for perfection

By Orestes Doumanis

I have worked with Elias Passissis for thirty years. Since 1972, he has supervised the layout of Architecture and Design in Greece. Throughout these years, the quality of his sketches to present the image of each page has made an especial impression on me. The faithful reduction in size of the magazine’s photographs corresponded to the realism characterising his paintings. And all this effort simply so that we might understand the spatial organisation of the page, the balances between void and mass, the arrangement.

This care for the complete organisation of the painted area is obvious in Elias Passissis’ pictures as is the perfect and faithful rendering of the subject in each canvas; a labour demanding true passion to achieve the perfection of this result.

And while all this effort could result in being cold and cerebral, it has a surprising poetic dimension, perhaps due to the passion hidden behind the creativity of each picture.

This poetic dimension gives validity to his work and evokes euphoria in the observer. And perhaps this is one of the aims of art.

Orestes Doumanis

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief,

Architecture and Design in Greece

Our Elias

By Thomas Ath. Theofilatos

Normally, when looking at a painting, we fail to give as much attention as we should to that aspect of the work that only art is capable of revealing.

However, this does not happen when looking at pictures by Elias Passissis. The reason is that his works are alive. The provocative and many times audacious liveliness coming from them is not achieved by colours as such, but by the play of colours, the light and shade, the relief, the composition, the harmonic balance of objects, making the image appear natural.

Hegel said “the triumph of art over reality is its ability to capture that which is greater than what exists”.

This exactly characterises the power leaping from works by Elias: to give duration to that which is instant. And this is art.

As a true non-professional lover and creator of art, Passissis uses his talent to borrow from Nature its highest aesthetic quality: to magically permeate to the most minute details and when this happens individually in each of his works, the sum comes together as a musical fugue, wherein one part ‘chases’ while at the same time gives birth to and carefully prepares the place for the next.

Here, aesthetics pronounce verdict on the tedium, impasse, threat and fear of subjugation to things which have become all-powerful in our contemporary capitalist era and which have come to dominate us.

Quite often, images convey a mysterious quality that cannot be defined. Here, images and objects work as signposts to tempt the observer to discover the unutterable message of the deepest inner self. This is the artist within.

So, whether wanting to or not, works by Elias are seen and felt, for, somehow psychologically, by using symbols, their creator enters the secret world of things and challenges you to bring into play your own potential, to follow him and discover for yourself the trapped power hidden within them; to feel their soul and have sympathy for them.

Also, there are objects that would seem to be part of the world around us, outside us, existing before us and certainly after us. There are ‘occult’ symbols you might say only have meaning for mystics and which, by connotation, overpower the observer receiving them by dent of the intensity of feelings and deeply poignant concerns of the artist. This is how we are moved on discovering Meaning, on understanding Essence, when we commune with the affliction of holiness, not of that which seems, but Is.

Our Elias, because he is exactly what a great artist should be, has spoken and will always speak in heartfelt dialogue with the light within our eyes.

Thomas Ath. Theofilatos

25.02.2002

The proffering of the soul

By Makis Passisis

Being brother to Elias Passissis, I am dismissed, a priori, as incapable of pronouncing any objective opinion on his work and this even more so since I am not an expert, which, were that the case, might lend some validity to my judgement.

It is exactly these weaknesses which constituted the inner impulse leading to my writing this text, for, by nature and life, I live a life ‘in parallel’ with the artist, a fact which, in itself, renders me a natural communicant of his work and an eye-witness to his journey. Following his life and painting from his early to his mature years, I will refer to those elements, which, in my opinion, make his work true, sincere and substantial. The consistency and timelessness that characterise him in his personal life are, even more effectively, more steadily, more enduringly, impressed upon his pictures, down to the last brush stroke. His obsession with detail is not simply a form of artistic expression, nor does it stem from a disposition to ‘suffer’ through painting or impress with the perfect outcome of his work. He reflects his torturous obsession in his values and ideas which he has served and maintains with pious devotion throughout his journey.

Paraphrasing a verse of Ritsos in The Greek Nation, I would say that for Elias, the brush is an extension of his hand and his hand is an extension of his soul. For exactly this reason, Elias has never compromised, neither in his life, nor in his work. He has not sold out and he has not been bought. His work has been exhibited and respected, without parading himself or betraying his credos. This is perhaps that side of him which is beyond criticism, which explains the appearance of his works, their subject matter and their enduring quality. Pictures done twenty or thirty years ago continue to be as relevant today, as they are certain to be in the future.

The decrepit objects and the wastelands of our loneliness are part of our daily reality, within and without, diligently embellished by the ‘art’ of misguided bliss surrounding us. These scream out in all languages and in all eras, attempting to wake those lying languidly on their sofas below curly-haired wind-blown figures with classical profiles decorating their fossilised living-rooms in the fashion of our consumerism.

Elias speaks his own language with the accent of art and the proffering of the soul. He comes to us more as a friend than a mystic. I am fortunate to be counted as one of his friends.

Makis Passisis   

Where Man Has Gone

By Nikos Andonatos

The weight of time – the wear and tear – that for ever so many human attempts has so far not been neutralised. Fruitless, but not in vain. Tragic, but not devastating. The struggle has not ended, nor is it about to. Endlessly, Man will ponder his fate. On one side the disused, a wreck, rejects. Masses, weight, pile-up on the other, intensifying the subject matter, exhausting all human endurance. The painter’s obsession with each sacred detail holds taut the rope on which vision balances between technique and creativity. Whatever we see is recognised from before, but never as it is presented to us. Banality crucified by means of fast, cheap objects, sterility. Time fixed in its own work of dilapidation and Man, agent of all things, absent, removed. There, where he goes to scoff or not be seen in his retreat of fear, a sudden light, emanating from a chance reflection, shining from the surface of disuse, or from a crack in time’s grey greed, sounds the lyrical chords of the soul’s alarm and then the poetry offered by the painter us opens its doors and reduces us to reflection, to a dream, to utopia, dividing lyre from fate, object from reality, Man from what is human.

Passissis, working like God (who in Christian myth created the world in seven days) exhaustively, minus the volume, gives us the centuries-old perfection of nature, through the divine power from which Man, by dent of his soul, benefits. I would add that in this way greatness is achieved, but it is best not to know this beforehand, nor even in hindsight. So that we might protect suspended innocence, like frayed edges, not miss the still flowing language of the colours, before it dries up with the paint. Mournful, ominous sun hovering behind, now like a grim overseer of the world, now like a precious drawn curtain, or closed source of energy (despite it looking like a giant lethal pill). By this extreme, let’s say, dirge-like symbolism, Passissis is striving for the total preclusion of evasion, or misinterpretation. The centre of our solar system, the sun, is not sunny, urging us not to go further, to the dawnless morrow, making all the horns of trains, cars, ships and spacecraft blast out an SOS. Below an inky sun, all without shadow, motionless in the painted light, without Spring or Autumn, Winter or Summer. Fired by their own long-gone past, rendered by the merciless hand of the painter, in astonishing detail, they constitute all that is uncreative, rejected, in a universal outcry of abandonment … the sun appeared red and the moon black.

A ‘breakfast’ among wreckage and the remains of cars, castigating similar efforts in the history of painting always taking place in harmony with Nature and Man, only that here, everything is heavy and indigestible to the stomach, in a raped environment without trace of fertile land, just the immaculate tablecloth, set with simple tempting dishes, there unrelenting to invite Man to wait.

To convey the dream, whether by the red border of the tablecloth or the appearance, as if by divine intervention, of a computer screen, exploring, through a gargantuan effort at depiction, ways for it to be disseminated one eye to another, even there where it moves headless or even disarmed. The painter Passissis does not promise us anything. He reveals to us in loud fashion the murky reality of our time, and brutally, of our despair, reminding us of the line from Aristophanes, ‘without wings, transitory, wretched, mortal men like shadows of a dream’; he stirs us, putting before us our long-lost dream and calls us to the one way out: to dream anew.

Nikos Andonatos  

Recollections

By Annita Patsouraki

My personal acquaintance with Elias Passissis began when I was still a student. I had already heard a lot about him and his work from my parents and others from my home district.

Full of admiration and enthusiasm, I declared with joy, as he recalls, that I would very much like to study his work.

Now, after many years of friendship and mutual respect, my wish has finally come to pass.

I will dare to express, with emotion, a few thoughts on the magnificent creations of an astute and sensitive artist, whose work is an experiential and emotional expression of thoughts and concerns of the soul, often prophetic and ridiculing global socio-political phenomena that have fundamentally changed or determined ideas and the course of human existence.

He is multidimensional in his creativity, materialising his vision through his own distinct, authentic and absolutely individual manner of expression, in an endeavour that is rare in this age of consumer art and society.

‘With thought and a dream’, to quote our national poet, Solomos, Elias Passissis records the poetic expression of emotions and dreams both realistically and with the power of realism.

His painting, through his own personal ‘brushmanship’, is not made up of obvious periods on an evolving path. His works do not consist in sequential subject matter, yet, independent of each other, finally come together as such. They are separate creations, mysteriously connecting to each other through an enduring common criterion and message.

He is working towards a social criticism, touching on issues such as consumerism and violence, worried by the entrapment of modern man held hostage. Yet, amid all this, he manages to convey his ideas through meaningful symbols and identifiable objects that do not result in a conventional depiction, but rather, discretely attract our attention through unambiguous allusions.

Knowledgeable and expert in the use of technical skills, he moves fluently around the notions and vocabulary of cubist, abstract and surrealist art without these elements becoming confused, always with the purpose of showing the ability of the artist to abstract and compose both his subject and the message the observer is meant to embrace.

As he has stated himself, ‘the image spurs the observer to more profound thoughts and reflection’.

Observers must think about and question the existence and role of objects we use, or remnants of them, in our life and presence, asking meaningful questions and exploring their own raison d’être in an existential context.

They are called on by this passive exposure to transform into active participants in the process imposing flux on our banality, to become activated, to react to the new symbols that are the images and patterns of our world.

By doing this, the artist has conveyed his message to the public, presenting works both salient and provocative.

In Elias Passissis’ choices of subject we can see a devastated environment that threatens to become the décor of our future.

In Picnic, he alludes to the need to be vigilant in the protection of the environment while drawing attention to the lamentable absence of colour and the static nature of life.

His landscapes are the ‘physical environs’ experienced in his life, deserted and impersonal, with a questioning optimism. The physical landscape refers back to how his hometown, the place of his birth appeared; flat, barren, melancholic, intensely tinged by loneliness, but also granting him a profound inwardness that allowed him to ponder, anticipating something beyond.

There is an absence of people in Elias Passissis’ paintings. Their presence is implied by their products. The sense of decay and dilapidation is intimated by the carefully deliberated interspersion of rubbish. Man has created this and so, the artist believes, it should be rendered with ‘love and compassion’.

The old engines, rusty cars, worn-out clothes, defunct every-day objects or used-up cleaning products, symbolise the inner void, our debased values.

The tattered clothes, in particular, represent for him ‘our tattered dreams, white cloth represents what is untarnished and pure, our inner self’.

The composition in these works is not random. The voluminously optical appearance of rubbish, the agglomeration of all manner of objects, are structured and organised, internally harmonious in design and colour, so that we arrive at an ideational premise, a rendering of notional allusions.

In the same way, but in a visually abstract vein, the subject matter alternates with the theme of ‘communication’. The artist is very aware of the lack of communication between people and this is suggested by joining monochromatic surfaces cut by cables. Technology, the computer, batteries, are what modern man is dependent on to communicate. These elements reinforce our artificial life. The artist’s signature, here placed exactly below a cut cable, discreetly draws attention to the human presence.

Reference to people is always oblique. The human element in figure form is absent but is declared through actual names, memories of friends from his home, people who have played an important role in his life, family and loved ones.

Elias Passissis’ art consists in a conventional use of oil paint to masterfully produce areas of flat and plane, avoiding excess and effusion.

By the transparency of his glass, the shine of metal and the soft texture of material, reminiscent of the great masters, his work is absolutely true to life and starkly real, taking it beyond the confines of a sterile photographic reproduction.

His use of drawing helps him in this. It is accurate, specific, mindful of traditional

models of what is of merit in painting, strengthened by form and colour, enveloping objects in credibility to make them completely recognisable.

Colours sensitively fluctuate through all their tones, shades and harmonies; separated into intense-clear and gentle-calm, symbolically mirroring our dreams, hopes and aspirations. “The intense colours symbolise our unfulfilled dreams, our aspirations before the loss of our dreams. The cool-grey colours, in tones of blue and ochre are hope. The soft tones are the result of unsuccessful action”, says Elias Passissis, translating his personal visual vocabulary.

The play between light and shade is characterised by intensely balanced contrasts,

allowing objects, real or illusionary, to be discerned in the shadow.

With his work, Elias Passissis ponders fundamental themes in life, exploring them through art. His creations carry the idea of the influence, change and impermanence of time through static images.

By the use of ordinary objects in rendered form and organised arrangement, using strict technical rules, he shows his concern for their transmutation, reflecting elements of what is fragmentary and transient, as demanded or imposed by contemporary society.

We are moved, made sensitive, challenged to communicate and discover within us unseen mystical pathways of our soul in a reassessment of the work of art.

Annita Patsouraki

Art Historian

 

The Remains of a Day,

Thoughts on the Paintings of Elias Passissis

(By Elias Constantopoulos)

While looking at paintings by Elias Passissis, I was reminded of an Austrian Architect friend, who, on seeing how excited I was by Vienna and its architecture, commented on how unfortunate it was that there was nothing old left in his capital: it was all designed, clean and positioned exactly as it ‘should’ be. This, for him, was an admission of loss. Here in Freud’s home city, civilisation, that fount of all misery, had ostracised the image of things dilapidated inevitably brought on by time.

Elias Passissis’ artistic course, which has been developing consistently for many years and until now has not been seen in its entirety, shows remarkable perseverance both in subject matter and technique.

It is an obsession with a precise depiction of industrial civilisation’s debris and destruction left behind by the twentieth century, conveyed through a photographic realism akin to the hyper-realist movement of the 1970’s in the USA. One wonders where this trend in painting objects in space, obstinate in the face of the much better work done by photography for more than a century now, might be going other than to challenge camera obscura itself through compositional painting.

As with Kasparov’s chess matches with Deep Blue, here is revealed man’s attempt to surpass yet another perfection of the industrially produced, the artificial. These paintings are not admired for their similarity to reality, but rather to a photograph! Their superiority to a photograph lies in their uniqueness. At the end of the twentieth century, the ability to mechanically reproduce multiple and facsimile copies, which, in the opinion of Walter Benjamin, deprives a work of art of its ‘aura’, has come up against a stubborn adversary, a perhaps Quixotic artistic attempt, aspiring once and for all to depict the world as well as a photography.

Both beyond yet because of this excess, Passissis’ painting is not a simple depiction as he consciously attempts to compose randomly scattered elements into an organised whole. How can such a conglomeration of junk constitute a priceless composition? The geometric organisation of shapes and orchestration of colour display a classical lucidity that goes beyond their modern subject matter. This clarity can be seen in the tight structure of his works showing engines, rubbish and buildings as well as his minimalist monochromatic works, in which a single painted cord and its shadow go to form a perfectly balanced composition, carefully constructed and worthy of Mondrian.

Elias Passissis’ preoccupation with the absolutely realistic recording of things – bills, rubbish, cardboard boxes, cleaning products, cars and a host of other recognisable everyday objects – sets him apart from as much as it links him to the intent of hyper-realism. His works do not glorify consumer society through its transitory paraphernalia as happens in the ‘cool’ works of Tom Blackwell, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes and others, nor does it glorify the intimate urban banalities of Athens, with its yards and service stairs coming from the brush of Spyros Vasileios. These same everyday elements do not have the lustre of the Americans nor the nostalgic mood of the latter, just the dust of time, returning man’s products to the earth, where they really belong: dust unto dust. The passing of time, the transitory nature of things, man’s vain struggle for material progress and the dust which covers them, so loved by Picasso, like a sprinkling of icing sugar on man’s life and objects. That is why Passissis’ pictures, with their warm and bleached out shades of blue, their yellow and ochre of the afternoon sun, seethe with signs of the presence of man – despite his absence – in the traces he has left behind, such as a picnic amongst scrap metal.

The painter stands at a distance from the subject that allows the various parts to have equal weight, similar to grains of sand, and often the same objects are considered from different angles. Passissis does indeed paint deserts, the deserts of the technical civilisation that let man pass through, not with Brecht’s admiration for hidden, classical analogies in buildings, but simply by recording our ephemeral existence. Technical achievements that have worn out and lost their former glory and shine, literally still (‘dead’ in Greek) lifes.

Yet, his works are tough. They show things as they are, raw, without whitewashing them. The dented corrugated iron and creased material are folds in a personal torment, not nostalgically sought out by the artist, but boldly and patiently brought together by him. His cars are observed debris with gutted engines and discarded tyres; his cities are featureless corners, balcony ledges and bear yards. Featureless, but seen with absolute accuracy and an exhaustive depiction of detail, taking on the beauty seen by the painter as he draws them from the oblivion to which they have been condemned, like someone collecting and dusting off the remains left behind by material society. This is his view, his near mania in an effort to record these details, so intimate, and that we no longer pay any attention, deeming them worthless. Scenes and moments in a world we recognise yet never stop to see, far from its glory, forgotten in its decrepitness.

A wonky car looking straight at you like a hippopotamus, a stationary bus in the middle of nowhere, a wasteland, with an old advertisement, ‘Have you eaten Stella Spaghetti?’ The artist’s perspective is at once objective and full of unlikely humour. Passissis’ biting humour often appears in his paintings, such as Death pointing to a cast-iron chair or a framed red Statue of Liberty as background to a roll of toilet paper. Bittersweet comments on a society that does not seem to hold its own ideas in much esteem and is littered with dead ends.

Suddenly, amongst the endless graveyards of all manner of engines, one discovers unanticipated forms – which bring to mind the paradoxical objects in Magritte’s paintings – inexplicable elements such as colourful sculptured pipes next to a neighbourhood, a block of flats’ buzzer-board hovering over sand, two apparently giant batteries in soil …

The painter’s critical sense of positioning can be seen in his addition of clean, geometrical shapes in the midst of household objects. An indefinable, hanging black sphere often appears in Passissis’ painting’ seeming as a possible threat, a concentrated black hole, ready to explode or conceal its contents for ever. This sphere also appears hovering on the screen of a personal computer amongst a pile of rubbish, acting as an omen of some unwritten future, perhaps bleak, perhaps hopeful…

P.S. Having finished this text, I had another look at the works in this volume and stopped at the picture with the Talens tube above a landscape – or perhaps more accurately above the restructuring of a landscape. The double entendre of the painted tube in relief is perhaps the promise of painting. Like the mirrors that only reflect the sky to their collective selves, the two-dimensional depiction of what is real and the three-dimensional refutation of that depiction displays Passisis’ taunting tendency to tell us the truth within the lie.

Elias Constantopoulos

25^th September, 2002-10-07

 

By Kleopatra Leontaritou

The aggression of raw environmental immediacy, the anti-aesthetic aesthetic, the hyper-realist realistic derision and criticism of Pop Art were the most successful aesthetic solution Passissis could find to express the ecological tragedy of the Greek urban centre. The message and the aesthetic medium coincide in dialectic harmony. The content is transmuted into form and form into content. The artist is in total possession of the technical means – which are most demanding – for this rendering of surrealist realism.

Kleopatra Leontaritou

December, 1983

By Dora Iliopoulos-Rogan (November, 1987)

The antithesis between the only apparently carefree city and the already extant threat in abeyance intensifies the message in works by Elias Passissis.

By Emmanuel Mavrommatis (November, 1981)

In Greece, Elias Passissis paints landscapes of technological materiel, engines, wrecked cars, tyres, fan belts and wheels, with astonishing accuracy. These features of the technological landscape endow Passissis’ painting, however remotely, with the ability of his artistry to give reality and life to the cold world of technology.

Martha Hristofoglou  {February, 1990)

The visual realism of the 70’s had revealed the expressive effectiveness of detachment or ‘objective’ inspection of the everyday world. The hackneyed neutrality of certain subjects can take on intensity and significance in painting if they are treated properly. Images that normally pass unnoticed, such as those painted by Elias Passissis, become noteworthy precisely because they are painted. Powerful optical impressions can be created when the painter highlights their spurious depictive perfection. By a detailed process of reconstruction, concepts firmly rooted in reality are brought to the fore, which, but for the intervention of the painter, would not be revealed.

The painting of Elias Passissis

By Assantour Baharian

When one sees painting by Elias Passissis, one cannot help wondering how he manages to transform the barbarity and ugliness of our environment into a visual event. It is not a matter of a random, fleeting look at places where the remnants of urban space pile up, evoking a nostalgia of guilt, a nostalgia for a paradise lost.

Elias Passissis’ eye is persistently fixed on these places and things, the eye of one who cannot pretend that he does not see or that he forgets. His pictures overflow with broken-down cars, bits of iron, bolts, wire, tyres, rubbish, bottles, useless engines, with an intensity that hurls a cry to the naïve and makes us close our eyes in horror. The beaches are ‘written off’, the shadow of the pistol falls across them, in an Athens neighbourhood all the tribulations of modern times are concentrated in a heavy black sphere domineeringly hovering in the air with the smallish hazy sun reflected on it. Yet, within the industrial landscape, a makeshift table is laid for a picnic. Elsewhere, a suburban bus with open windows is waiting, perhaps to transport us ‘out’. It is the entrapped human element that does not escape Elias Passissis and which he evokes, poignantly reminding us, as he juxtaposes bills in one painting, that we can pay our taxes, the electricity and phone bills, but the cost of the city’s incalculable consumerism is far greater.

Assantour Baharian

November 1983

A forceful protest

By Giorgio Marcou

Mr Elias Passissis placed us, with his latest exhibition in Athens (Ora Gallery, Xenofontos St) in the world of high technology, invaded by enormous industrial complexes, automobile cemeteries, buildings made of aluminium and glass, outer space constructions in traditional areas of the town. The green fields and the flower gardens have already begun to disappear. Vast junkyards, with all the litter of modern industry appear instead. Picnics do not take place in the fields any more but in the middle of automobile cemeteries outside the town. The sun in many towns does not shine brightly, because it is black from smog. If we add the huge and tiring bureaucracy that exists we come face to face with Passissis’ paintings: a forceful protest against the progress of industry destroying people’s health.

Elias Passissis is a successful Greek artist and graphics man, not only in Greece but abroad. He follows the method of photographic realism, and that’s why some people criticise him. We think, and so do many Italian critics, that it is the only artistic way he can deliver with success and strength his messages which psychologically puzzle those who see him. His paintings are very big and ‘technique’ is excellent. His exhibition was successful from two points of view: as an idea and as an artistic realisation.

Giorgio Marcou

February, 1984

 

By Sofia Kazazi

The artist is exhibiting a collection of oil paintings at the Pansellinos Gallery. Although self-taught, empirically, by instinct and his talent in painting, he has captured the domain of neo-realism. This contemporary trend in art has afforded him uninterrupted contact with reality, everyday life. With clarity and precision, he paints simple subjects, ordinary objects, such as soft drink bottles, discarded detergent containers, coloured barrels and a shiny, new bus. By choosing simple things, his painting transforms the reality about us, the context of our life passed by with indifference.

Memories of his origins, Messolongi, are often with him in his neo-realist paintings. In his important composition, A Sculpture in a Particular Setting, he achieves social satire by prominently placing the modern coloured structure in a dilapidated local neighbourhood. So too, with Rubbish Dump, he manages a wonderful compositional result painting motley disused objects. The technical rendering of the worn-out objects is perfect without needing a camera lens. Their realistic shades and dimensions calmly convey the image of inevitable wear and tear. However, the particularly enthralling element in his paintings is the transcendental atmosphere surrounding and accompanying his objects. This characteristic, the assimilated meeting in his paintings of hyper-realist tenor and neo-realist rendition is his special achievement.

Sofia Kazazi  

Art Critic for Diagonal,

Thessaloniki, 1976

305 – Diagonal