3 December 2011

Renowned Greek painter ALEKOS FASSIANOS explains the link between Mount Olympus and Gotham City.

Myth, according to Alekos Fassianos, is everything.

It is our past, which informs our present, which creates our future.

“Everyone must have their myth alive inside of them,” Fassianos tells me as we sit outside the Hellenic Museum on a blustery Melbourne day.

“People that don’t have a myth don’t have a past. New countries aren’t based in anything that came before. Today you can’t live if there’s nothing to support you, something of where you come from,” he says.

“If you don’t have a past, you can’t have a future. Myth is essential, and it’s alive.”

Fassianos’ art is bound up in this theory, taking mythic events and teachings and transporting them into contemporary settings.

This acts to invoke a certain timelessness of the teachings of myths, transporting their meanings from ancient conception to contemporary application, proving that in essence, humanity hasn’t changed across the millennia.

“My art is inspired by this myth of Hellenism because ancient myth is eternal and is alive, and we must take example from it,” Fassianos says.

“The ancients worshipped everything. Rivers for example, they knew they shouldn’t pollute them because it was a sin.”

“The ancients would invoke Athena to protect them, just like today people invoke the Virgin Mary to protect them.”

“The Goddess Athena was virgin and wise, and matches with the Virgin Mary of today, who is also virgin and helps people. Don’t we say ‘Panagia mou’? They would have said ‘Athina mou’.”

“Nothing changes. It’s just the evolution of this myth that lives on in our thoughts, protects us, and allows us to progress. It’s civilization,” he says.

Fassianos was born in 1935 in Athens and grew up near the ancient agora. He studied the violin at the Athens Conservatory and painting at the School of Fine Arts.

In 1960 he moved to Paris to study lithography at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts.

Since then he’s had more than 70 individual exhibitions around the world, including in Paris, Tokyo and now in Melbourne.

Across all this time Fassianos has developed a unique style, consisting of rudimentary figures and bold colours, designed to show life at its most basic and meaningful.

He says he draws inspiration from the quotidian, the banal, and tries to extract its meaning by applying it to a mythic setting.

“At the same time I’m creating a new myth, I don’t just re-write old myths,” he says.

“For example, a cyclist riding along, I see as a divine being. A shadow on a wall I paint and turn it into a mythical being. It reaches into the past, but it’s a new thing as well.”

He has also developed his theory of mythology to the point that it consumes him, and he believes it informs all of human history, the present and future.

He says that despite the conception of myth as a product of yesteryear, human beings still have need of a historic identifier, a means to place themselves within the spectrum of human history, to the point that even in 2011 people are still developing myths.

“Myth is synthetic with history and the past. Many countries don’t have myth, for example America, which is only a few hundred years old, so it has created its own myth with Superman and Batman, who fly through the apartment buildings where the people live,” Fassianos says.

“They obviously had need of a myth, so they created a new one. Fables give life, give a story to that which is not real, but they also make it real. Just look, [the Americans] have made hundreds of films [about these myths], haven’t they? So people believe it now, children buy the books,” he explains.

In consuming his art, viewers usually point out Fassianos’ inclusion of movement, which is present in every work.

Motion, the artist says, is key, because movement is life.

“In Greece we have the wind, the meltemi, that blows hard, and when that happens everything comes alive – trees sway, neckties flap, hair gets tossed about. Things that were motionless before start moving,” he says.

“Movement is timeless – the planets are moving, aren’t they? Everything is moving, if movement stopped everything would die, there’d be nothing left. It’s with movement that the seasons change.”

“Sometimes the sea is still, other times it has waves, and we don’t like it when it’s still, somehow it doesn’t seem right, we want it to have some life. As you say, movement is life.”

It is clear that Fassianos’ entire existence is both bound up, and laid bare in his art. He says that through the scenes that he creates, he tries to set an example for others.

“From the things that I paint and the life that I live I want to show people that life needs to be measured and balanced, and that every person needs to know himself so that he can be free.”

“He shouldn’t follow others and do what everyone does, but should do that which pleases him so he can become spontaneous, autonomous and genuine – true to himself.”

AN EXHIBITION of Alekos Fassianos’ work entitled Ancient Myths – Modern Situations was launched at the Hellenic Museum in Melbourne last week.

Speaking at the launch, Fassianos said he felt at home among friends in Australia.

“I’m very grateful to find myself among you because it’s very nice for a Greek to find himself amongst Greeks, to feel happy and unafraid in a foreign place,” Fassianos said.

“Here in Australia I’ve found that the Greek community is very tightly connected, and maintains its Hellenism better than the Greeks in Greece, because you’re characterized by myths, those that were taken by your grandparents from the old islands that they came from.”

“The ancient myth lives here, and indeed I feel like Odysseus who circumnavigated all the world before returning to his homeland,” the artist told the gathered crowd.

Fassianos’ Ancient Myths – Modern Situations exhibition is open now at the Hellenic Museum in Melbourne, and will run through to February 2012.