Iraklis Parcharidis, Elegiac Painting

"Bodies? Say it again. Bodies.
It’s unclear, it can't be heard. Ask the touch.
Does it remember? Has it ever pronounced that word?"
Kiki Dimoula, "The Adolescence of Oblivion"

In an era where images rule everything because the visible has become an oppressor and only what is visible exists, painting seeks again to accomplish its old mission: to mediate through the visible to the invisible and to claim once again the soul of things while establishing above all, their body. If Duchamp through a Dadaistic negative attitude condemned the painting of the retina as vulgar, painting in our days, under certain circumstances, undertakes a crusade against the vulgarity of what is visible and claims the Epiphany-Theophany of what is hidden behind the image of the body, that is longing for its immortality. For these reasons we contempt decorative painting, for these reasons we renounce the painting that is ashamed for its body, hidden behind abstract concepts and smart tricks. This is why we search for the painting of revelation, which is the most difficult!

Iraklis Parcharidis, away from the neo-Greek descriptivism or the ready-made polychromatic emotions, artic­ulates a visual rationale, meditative, architectonic, and elegiac. His subject is the human existence in a world that constantly loses its human characteristics. Such an intention would easily tempt someone to use optical gabbles or melodramatic clichés. The cultivation of the painter however, as well as his mentality protect him from such narrow paths. His poeticism, through his clever drawing inflicts the formation of particular symbols: the figure, the house, the city, the tree, the group of people, the primordial landscape, and the mythical nature before the arrival of people. Dimoula would say it differently: "I am an amateur human being. How could I form better complains? Because painting in our days mostly exists to defend complains".

Through these visual symbols, his sets his work as if in a scenography of a text, the painting reason of which has not yet been written. A theatre without words... we could say that compared to his previous exhibition (Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, 2006) his paintings investigate fields and situations within a twilight zone. The materials are now more direct-earthy, stucco, charcoal, acrylic and e.t.c - and the result is less chromatic-conspicuous and more imposing-elegiac. Like a blurred wall painting of Roubliev, that has not been discovered yet, Parcharidis is painting in a monumental way and allusive chiaroscuros, the rope-walkers of a life that has been deformed, the myths and the miracles of a religion which has no more believers. In a time of torturing images and the lack of bodies -in other words the orphanhood of desire- Parcharidis sees the world with eyes half closed like the old hagiographers. In other words, he dreams the world and discovers it wandering in the edge of his soul.
In 1870, in Saint Russia with the encouragement of critic Vladimir Stasov, the new artists abandoned the capital and wandered at the vast steppes, in order to learn about the silent lives of the deprived masses. Because of this, they were named "Peredvizhniki" wanderers. Parcharidis is a perenvisnik like Ilya Repin with references that range from Russian, high morale realism, to the imaginative painting of Chagall. His adventure in painting all these years, has taught him something: that one can think better with his eyes closed. And that one sees better through misty eyes...

Manos Stefanidis

Professor of Art History

*Published in the “Iraklis Parcharidis, Elegiac Painting”  exhibition catalogue, Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, Athens, Greece, 2009.

Bibliography

·         Julian Bell, Mirror of the world, A new History of Art, Translation Giorgos Lambrakos- Eleanna Panagou, Metechmio, Athens 2009

·         Manos Stefanidis, Ellinomousion, Β publication, Volume 9th Eleftheros Tipos, Athens 2009, p. 71