Κατηγορία: painting

Intoxicating pleasures, deformities and disproportions: The Female in decorative arts and music

Introduction

“An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.” C.Baudelaire ( I thank “Paintisnotdead” for the quote)

Today I publish more of my favourite depictions of the female in sculptures, paintings and photos, accompanied by a song or an aria. Beaudelaire’s saying epitomizes what is the sense of beauty I am looking for. I am looking for all deformities and disproportions at the same time that I am captivated by the formal elements of beauty.

These are fragments, in the sense that Female Characters and Images and Music, all come together without a coherent Totality. Fragments, moments in times gone, characters in the course of history, real or imaginative.

Fragmenta

1. {Alma Mahler} 

The golden hair of Venus, her eyes contemplating the fate of whoever meets her gaze. She is confident, she is on top of the world, she is unbeatable in the game of Love. Tackling her is suicidal, but this type of death, under her gaze is a sweet death.

Liebst du um Schönheit,

O nicht mich liebe!

Liebe die Sonne,

Sie trägt ein gold’nes Haar!

If you love for beauty,

Oh, do not love me!

Love the sun,

She has golden hair!

(Detail from Botticelli’s “The birth of Venus, Ufizzi in Florence.)

2.(Mimi, La Boheme}

Golden brown hair, contemplation on the mirror, the bluish landscape offering a retreat from the heat of the internal scene. The confidence of Venus is gone. The young woman tries to see into her future. What does the mirror hold for her?

O soave fanciulla, o dolce viso
di mite circonfuso alba lunar,
in te ravviso il sogno
ch’io vorrei sempre sognar!

Oh! sweet little lady! Oh sweetest vision,
with moonlight bathing your pretty face!
The dream that I see in you
is the dream I’ll always dream!

(Young Woman in her Toilet, by Giovanni Bellini (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum)).

Gerhard Richter, Betty 1988

3. Everybody is talking at her, but Betty is looking away.

Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stopping staring,
I can’t see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.

I’m going where the sun keeps shining
Thru’ the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone.

I’m going where the sun keeps shining
Thru’ the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone

(Almost five centuries later, Gerhard Richter’s daughter, Betty, poses unusually in this 1988 portrait. I have published this portrait for the first time in the blog in my 2010 post honoring women.)

David Schoerner, Martynka

4. Run Away, Turn Away

You leave in the morning
With everything you own
In a little black case
Alone on a platform
The wind and the rain
On a sad and lonely face

Mother will never understand
Why you had to leave
But the answers you seek
Will never be found at home
The love that you need
Will never be found at home

Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.
Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.

Pushed around and kicked around
Always a lonely boy
You were the one
That they’d talk about around town
As they put you down

And as hard as they would try
They’d hurt to make you cry
But you never cried to them
Just to your soul
No you never cried to them
Just to your soul

Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.
Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.

Cry , boy, cry…

You leave in the morning
With everything you own
In a little black case
Alone on a platform
The wind and the rain
On a sad and lonely face

Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.
Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.

(Taking the lead from Richter’s unusual position for a portrait, David Schoerner, an American photographer, took this photo “Martynka (after Gerhard Richter’s Betty)”, honoring the oblique unusual pose of Richter’s Betty. I found this Martynka thanks to “Eloge de l’ Art par Alain Truong“).)

5. {Cio – Cio San (Madama Butterfly)}

Un bel dì, vedremo
levarsi un fil di fumo
sull’estremo confin del mare.
E poi la nave appare.
Poi la nave bianca
entra nel porto,
romba il suo saluto.
One good day, we will see
Arising a strand of smoke
Over the far horizon on the sea
And then the ship appears
And then the ship is white
It enters into the port, it rumbles its salute.

Cio-cio San asks the mirror the eternal question of beauty. This question is at the same time eternal and astonishingly temporal. She wants to know whether she is beautiful now, the very moment she is looking at the mirror. Tomorrow is too far away. “Am  I beautiful now?”

(The Japanese Master Hokusai painted a woman in front of her mirror. I like the somber background and the restrained tone of the colors.)

Alison Brady: Untitled 2006

6. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice

Brown hair covering the face, painted body inviting. Living painting, the canvas is now the human flesh.

Sally called when she got the word,
She said: “I suppose you’ve heard –
About Alice”.
Well I rushed to the window,
And I looked outside,
But I could hardly believe my eyes –
As a big limousine rolled slowly
Into Alice’s drive…

Oh, I don’t know why she’s leaving,
Or where she’s gonna go,
I guess she’s got her reasons,
But I just don’t want to know,
‘Cos for twenty-four years
I’ve been living next door to Alice.
Alice, who the fuck is Alice

Twenty-four years just waiting for a chance,
To tell her how I’m feeling, maybe get a second glance,
Now I’ve got to get used to not living next door to Alice…
Alice, who the fuck is Alice

Grew up together,
Two kids in the park,
Carved our initials,
Deep in the bark,
Me and Alice.
Now she walks through the door,
With her head held high,
Just for a moment, I caught her eye,
As a big limousine pulled slowly
Out of Alice’s drive.

Oh, I don’t know why she’s leaving,
Or where she’s gonna go,
I guess she’s got her reasons,
But I just don’t want to know,
‘Cos for twenty-four years
I’ve been living next door to Alice.
Alice, who the fuck is Alice

Twenty-four years just waiting for a chance,
To tell her how I’m feeling, maybe get a second glance,
Now I gotta get used to not living next door to Alice…
Alice, who the fuck is Alice

Sally called back, asked how I felt,
She said: “I know how to help –
Get over Alice”.
She said: “Now Alice is gone,
But I’m still here,
You know I’ve been waiting
For twenty-four years…”
And the big limousine disappeared…

I don’t know why she’s leaving,
Or where she’s gonna go,
I guess she’s got her reasons,
But I just don’t want to know,
‘Cos for twenty-four years
I’ve been living next door to Alice.
Alice, who the fuck is Alice

Twenty-four years just waiting for a chance,
To tell her how I feel, and maybe get a second glance,
But I’ll never get used to not living next door to Alice…
Alice, who the fuck is Alice

Now I’ll never get used to not living next door to Alice…

(The portrait is now mixed with the nude body. Coming to think of it, the face, the object or subject of the portrait, is always naked. But we do not say “this is a naked face”, because the face – even when made up – is always naked. Therefore we do not say it as it would be a tautology. In the rather elaborate photo taken by Alison Brady, the face is not only naked, but hidden. In Schoerner’s Martynka the face is not shown, but is not hidden. In Brady’s untitled woman the face is hidden on purpose, as if what matters most is the naked breasts that have been elaborately covered by a paint pattern. Therefore we have a juxtraposition not only of the portrait with the naked body, but of the photo with a painting, as the depicted body is painted.)

Roy Lichtenstein: Crying Girl

7. Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda

Cry, cry girl!!!

Piangi, piangi faciulla!

(Roy Lichtenstein’s crying girl brings pop art to the post. The face in this portrait is not naked, as it is dressed by tears.)

RB Kitaj: Sandra Fisher

8.  Love

I wanna be loved by you
just you and nobody else but you
I wanna be loved by you – alone.
Boo boo bee doo

I wanna be kissed by you
just you and nobody alse but you
I wanna be kissed by you – alone.
Boo boo bee doo

I couldn’t aspire
to anything higher
and to feel the desire
to make you my own.
Badum badum bee doodily dum ! Boo !

(No female portrait collection would be complete without RB Kitaj’s portrait of his beloved Sandra Fisher.)

RB Kitaj: Marynka smoking

9. Marynka, aka Lulu

You keep saying you’ve got something for me.
something you call love, but confess.
You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been a messin’
and now someone else is gettin’ all your best.

These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin’
and you keep losin’ when you oughta not bet.
You keep samin’ when you oughta be changin’.
Now what’s right is right, but you ain’t been right yet.

These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

You keep playin’ where you shouldn’t be playin
and you keep thinkin’ that you´ll never get burnt.
Ha!
I just found me a brand new box of matches yeah
and what he know you ain’t HAD time to learn.

These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

Are you ready boots? Start walkin’!

RB Kitaj: Marynka on her stomach

10. Lay lady lay

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Whatever colors you have in your mind
I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile
Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile
His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean
And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile
Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he’s standing in front of you

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead
I long to see you in the morning light
I long to reach for you in the night
Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead

(Kitaj also painted Marynka lying on her stomach.)

Aneta Bartos, untitled

11. Stairway to Heaven

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying the stairway to heaven.
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for.
Ooh, ooh, and she’s buying the stairway to heaven.

There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
In a tree by the brook, there’s a songbird who sings,
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, it makes me wonder.

There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west,
And my spirit is crying for leaving.
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees,
And the voices of those who stand looking.
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, it really makes me wonder.

And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason.
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter.

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
And it makes me wonder.

Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know,
The piper’s calling you to join him,
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.

And she’s buying the stairway to heaven.

(Another photo by Bartos)

Gerhard Richter: Ema - Nude on a staircase

12. Ema

And I would do anything for love,
I’d run right into hell and back.
I would do anything for love,
I’ll never lie to you and that’s a fact.

But I’ll never forget the way you feel right now, oh no, no way.
And I would do anything for love,
Oh I would do anything for love,
I would do anything for love,
But I won’t do that,
No I won’t do that.

And some days it don’t come easy,
And some days it don’t come hard,
Some days it don’t come at all, and these are the days that never end.

And some nights you’re breathing fire.
And some nights you’re carved in ice.
Some nights you’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before or will again.

And maybe I’m crazy.
Oh it’s crazy and it’s true.
I know you can save me, no one else can save me now but you.

As long as the planets are turning.
As long as the stars are burning.
As long as your dreams are coming true, you’d better believe it!

That I would do anything for love,
And I’ll be there till the final act.
And I would do anything for love,
And I’ll take the vow and seal a pact.

But I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t go all the way, tonight.

And I would do anything for love,
But I won’t do that.
No, I won’t do that!

I would do anything for love,
Anything you’ve been dreaming of,
But I just won’t do that.
[x2]

[Solo]
And some days I pray for silence,
And some days I pray for soul,
Some days I just pray to the god of sex and drums and rock ‘n’ roll!

And maybe I’m lonely,
That’s all I’m qualified to be.
There’s just one and only, one and only promise I can keep.

As long as the wheels are turning.
As long as the fires are burning.
As long as your prayers are coming true, you’d better believe it!

That I would do anything for love,
And you know it’s true and that’s a fact.
I would do anything for love,
And there’ll never be no turning back.

But I’ll never do it better than I do it with you, so long, so long.
And I would do anything for love,
Oh, I would do anything for love,
I would do anything for love,
But I won’t do that.
No, no, no, I won’t do…..

I would do anything for love.
Anything you’ve been dreaming of.
But I just won’t do that!
[x3]

But I’ll never stop dreaming of you,
Every night of my life.
No way.

And I would do anything for love.
But I won’t do that.
No I won’t do that.

[Girl]
Will you raise me up, will you help me down?
Will you get me right out of this God forsaken town?
Will you make it all a little less cold?

[Boy]
I can do that. Oh I can do that.

[Girl]
Will you cater to every fantasy I’ve got?
Will you hose me down with holy water, if I get too hot? Hot!
Will you take me places I’ve never known?

[Boy]
Now I can do that! Oh oh now, I can do that!

[Girl]
After awhile you’ll forget everything.
It was a brief interlude
And a midsummer night’s fling,
And you’ll see that it’s time to move on.

[Boy]
I won’t do that. I won’t do that.

[Girl}
I know the territory, I’ve been around,
It’ll all turn to dust and will all fall down,
Sooner or later, you’ll be screwing around.

[Boy]
I won’t do that. No, I won’t do that.

Anything for love,
Oh, I would do anything for love,
I would do anything for love,
But I won’t do that.
No, I won’t do that.

(Gerhard Richter’s painting )

Sarah Lucas: Nuds, 2010

13. Sweet Jane

Standing on the corner,
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset, and Jane is her vest,
And me I’m in a rock’n’roll band Hah!
Ridin’ in a Stutz Bear Cat, Jim
You know, those were different times!
Oh, all the poets they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes

Sweet Jane! Whoa! Sweet Jane, oh-oh-a! Sweet Jane!

I’ll tell you something
Jack, he is a banker
And Jane, she is a clerk
Both of them save their monies, ha
And when, when they come home from work
Oh, Sittin’ down by the fire, oh!
The radio does play
The classical music there, Jim
“The March of the Wooden Soldiers”
All you protest kids
You can hear Jack say, get ready, ah

Sweet Jane! Come on baby! Sweet Jane! Oh-oh-a! Sweet Jane!

Some people, they like to go out dancing
And other peoples, they have to work, Just watch me now!
And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that, women, never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo!
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that, life is just to die!
And, everyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it!

Sweet Jane! Whoa-oh-oh! Sweet Jane! Sweet Jane!

Heavenly wine and roses
Seems to whisper to her when he smiles
Heavenly wine and roses
Seems to whisper to her when she smiles
La lala lala la, la lala lala la
Sweet Jane
Sweet Jane
Sweet Jane

(The transfiguration of food objects into body parts was a post that brought Sarah Lucas to my blog. Her NUDS is a series of sculptures that I find intriguing. I quote from the “Auckland’s Art Festival 2011” relevant web page:)

Sarah Lucas: Nuds, 2010

(Lucas’s new sculptural series, NUDS, consists of nylon tights stuffed with fluff and fashioned into ambiguous biomorphic forms. The coinage NUDS itself implies knots, nodes, or nudes and is evidence of Lucas’s use of puns, slang and language as elements of her sculpture.  The works brim with allusions, inviting different interpretations from the tender to the auto-erotic. Leaning towards primitivism and abstraction, they echo the work of iconic British sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The sculptural approximation of the female form also links back to the gender-orientated works that defined Lucas’s early practice, in which assemblages of found objects became stand-ins for the female body.)

Harakiri School Girls: by Makoto Aida

“It is spirit, not painting” Makoto Aida says in the closing frame of Japan Society’s video for the exhibition “Bye Bye Kitty” in New York. (the link to the video is at the end of this post).

Today I want to present Makoto Aida’s work “Harakiri School Girls”. This is a composition that recurs in the artist’s activity. It first appeared in 1999, when the artist wanted to create a poster for his first solo exhibition. What attracted me to the painting is the 2002 print on film with acrylic, which you can see immediately below.

Harakiri School Girls, 2002

I am a fan of manga, the Japanese comics. So I was immediately attracted to the  picture, as it looks like manga in a way, but when you open the door and get in it is something totally different. I am also fascinated by the bright neon lights in Tokyo’s streets, the advertising billboards, the extremely crowded and chaotic urban scenes. I could find elements of all these in the picture.  So I present to you all three versions I could find, the original 1999, the “flashy” 2002, and the more etherial 2006, along with some commentaries.

Makoto Aida

“Harakiri School Girls combines the fetishistic fashions and nubile bodies of fantasy schoolgirls with the time-honored samurai practice of ritual suicide.”

(Source: Japan Society’s “Bye Bye Kitty“)

“Hara-kiri Schoolgirls” is typical of the images by Japanese multimedia artist Makoto Aida, who has created numerous series portraying mutilated young women as consumer goods. This image is intentionally shocking: according to the artist, it combines beauty and violence in order to challenge deeply rooted ideas about Japanese beauty and bring to light elements of the grotesque.

(Source: Jewish Museum, Berlin, Made in Japan)

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi - The Foxfires

“Several of the artists borrow from archaic Japanese pictorial conventions, only to skewer them with a contemporary nihilist sensibility. Makoto Aida’s brightly colored “Harakiri School Girls” emulates the style and violent subject matter of the 19th-century artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, but the atrocious acts pictured — ritual suicides, beheadings and disembowelings — are performed by pretty, uniformed schoolgirls, a possible reference to a culture that has lost its bearings.”

(Source: Artkabinet, Elisabeth Kirsch)

Harakiri School Girls, Poster, 1999

“During the late nineties, as gal culture was running rampant, Aida became intrigued. “I think those kogals in the 1990s were originals,” he says. “Historically and even globally, they were unique, and I sought a way to portray them.” Inspiration came from a group of high school girls squatting on the ground in Shibuya. “The scene reminded me of besieged warriors who have decided to commit mass suicide.” Out of this, Aida created Harakiri School Girls, originally as a poster to advertise his first solo exhibit in 1999, and later as a painting for the Singapore Biennale 2006.

Book Cover: "Japanese Schoolgirls Inferno"

Laced with dark humor, the work shows a group of uniform-clad schoolgirls plunging samurai swords into their stomachs, disemboweling themselves, and slicing off their own heads. The flash of a blade creates a rainbow in the blood spurting from a girl’s neck. A stream of blood flows past a curious kitten, karaoke flyers, and discarded tissues, into a drain. The work is gruesomely cute. “Harakiri School Girls is an allegory for the distorted mentality of Japanese youth at the time and the atmosphere of Japanese society,” Aida explains. “After the Bubble Economy collapsed, I felt that an air of pessimism was spreading through Japan like a virus.” Everything might have looked cute and happy, but underneath that veneer seethed dejection and darkness. During the nineties, the number of suicides increased year by year, and according to Aida, Japanese patriotism withered away. These schoolgirls, in their loose socks and school uniforms, symbolize the entire country, killing itself.”

(Source: Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential, by Brian Ashcraft and Shoko Ueda )

Thesis Abstract
The Schoolgirl Body in Pieces: The Manga Portraiture of Makoto Aida

Manga has been an established form of popular expression in the Japanese visual field for centuries. During the postwar era, manga reflected a cultural shift in the identity of the national body, as a formerly cohesive imperial nation fell into fragments in the wake of defeat and control by American military forces. Framed by this shift, the manga renditions of brutalized and sexualized Japanese schoolgirls by the contemporary Japanese artist Makoto Aida convey elements of a nation’s fractured identity still shaped by it’s postwar temperament and global positioning. Certain moments of Japan’s present-day manifestations of postwar trauma find revitalized visual expression when inscribed upon the bodies of these girls, revealing the psychic role of the body in postwar and present-day Japan and how national memories of the past are constructed through bodily tropes. Aida’s appropriation of these bodies also reveals the engagement of the wound with historical memory, and the unstable constructions of female sexuality and identity that linger in contemporary Japan.

Harakiri School Girls, 2006

The narrative of the male fantasy in which a young girl is desired, attacked, stimulated, and brought to ecstasy has been present in Japan since the 1970s, persisting as a major trope within manga and anime. Graphic depictions of sexualized young girls play a major role in contemporary Japanese visual culture and because of this, “she” has become a highly readable and visible format from which to instigate social criticism and expression. I would like to suggest that the immediate and cursory misogyny that is visible in Aida’s depictions of young girls borrows from these pornographic genres as a subversive gesture that re-appropriates this bodily narrative vessel for social commentary. An examination of Aida’s imagery unveils the social forces shaping the artist’s source material, the implied spectators and their habits of bodily consumption.

Poster for the movie "Uniform Sabaigaru", where innocent schoolgirls hack zombies into bloody chunks

I will discuss two of Aida’s manga works in which the young girls are presented with varying degrees of agency and submission when confronted with their brutalization. With Harakiri Schoolgirls (2006), the girls are depicted in a more individualized and essentialized manner. Here, a bevy of vibrant, uniformed Japanese schoolgirls commit stylized acts of self-inflicted suicide (harakiri) and decapitation. Of Aida’s schoolgirl imagery, this piece is unique in that the girls retain a certain control over the fatal violence. The second series, The Edible Artificial Girls, Mimi-chan (2001) is an example of Aida’s work in which the girls are presented en masse and in pieces as the main ingredient in an array of delicious Japanese dishes. Mimi-chan works as Aida’s hyper-realized riff on the dominant characterization of Japanese girls as the ultimate material consumers and the problematic consumability of these bodies. A portrayal connected to the ideological commodification of the female body that was conceived during the postwar era.

(Source: Maya Kimura’s Thesis Abstract)

In lieblicher Blaue – In lovely blue: A poem by Friedrich Holderlin

Louise Keller, Holderlin (1842) drawing

More than a year ago, I wrote a post about Holderlin’s “Hyperion”. Today I revisit the great German poet, and present his poem “In lovely blue”. I have added some pictures to the words. In addition, there are explicary notes to the poem and the pictures. All of them are at the end of the post.

In Lovely Blue
by Friedrich Hölderlin
(Translated by Glenn Wallis)

Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, MOMA, Ney York (See Note 1)

In lovely blue blooms the steeple with its metal
roof. Around the roof swirls the swallows’ cry,
surrounded by most touching blue. The sun rises high
above and tints the roof tin. But in the wind beyond, silently,
a weathercock crows. When someone comes forth from
the stairs of the belfry, it is a still life. And though the form
is so utterly strange, it becomes the figure of a
human being. The windows out of which the bells resound are as
gates to beauty. Because gates still take after nature
they resemble forest trees. Purity, too, is beauty. From within, out
of diverse things, a grave spirit emerges. So simple,
these images, so holy, that one often fears
to describe them. But the heavenly ones, always
good, possess, even more than the wealthy, virtue and
joy. Humans may follow suit. Might a person, when
life is full of trouble, look up and say: I, too,
want to be like this? Yes. As long as friendliness and purity
dwell in our hearts, we may measure ourselves not unfavorably
with the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest
as the sky?(a) This I tend to believe. It is the measure
of the human. Deserving, yet poetically, we dwell
on this earth (b). The shadow of night with its stars,
if I may say so, is no purer than we
who exist in the image of the divine (c).

Andre Butzer, Nasaheim (See Note 2)

Is there measure on earth? There is none. (d) For
the creator’s worlds can never contain the clap of thunder.
Because it blooms under the sun, a flower, too, is beautiful.
In life, the eye often finds creatures to call more beautiful
still than flowers. Oh! I know this well!
For to bleed in body and heart and cease to be whole—
does this please God? The soul, I believe, must remain
pure, or else the eagle will wing its way to the almighty
with songs of praise and the voice of so many
birds. It is substance and it is form. Beautiful little
brook, so touching you seem as you roll so clear,
like the eye of God, through the Milky Way. I know
you well. But tears stream from my eyes. A clear
life I see in the forms of creation that blooms around me
because I do not compare them unreasonably with the lonely pigeons
in the churchyard. People’s laughter seems
to grieve me—after all, I have a heart. Would I
like to be a comet? I believe so. For they have the quickness
of birds, they blossom in fire, and in their purity is as children’s.
To wish for more is beyond the measure of human nature.
The clarity of virtue also deserves praise from the grave
spirit that blows between the garden’s three pillars. A beautiful virgin must
garland her head with myrtle, for to do so is simply
her nature and her sensibility. But myrtle trees are found in Greece.

Samuel Francis, In lovely Blueness 2 (1955-56) (See Note 3)

When a person looks into a mirror and sees
his image, as if painted, that is like the Manes.
The human form has eyes, but the moon has light.
Perhaps King Oedipus (e) had an eye too many. This
man’s suffering seems indescribable, unspeakable,
inexpressible. When the drama presents it so, so it is. But how is it with me?
Am I thinking now of your suffering? Like brooks, the end of
Something as vast as Asia is carrying me toward it. Oedipus, of course, suffered like this, too;
and certainly for the same reason. Did Hercules suffer as well? Of course.
Did not the Dioscuri, too, in their friendship bear pain?
As Hercules fought with God—that is
suffering. And immortality in envy of this life—
to divide these two—that, too, is suffering. But it is also
suffering when a person is covered with freckles—
to be completely covered with freckles! The beautiful
sun does that, for it draws out everything. The path
seduces the young with the charm of its rays, like roses.
Oedipus’s suffering is like a poor man
wailing that he is deprived. Son Laios, poor
stranger in Greece. Life is death, and
death is also a life.

Emil Nolde, March Landscape in the evening (See Note 4)

Notes to the poem

(a) Note that in German, Sky is Himmel, which also stands for Heaven.

(b) This is the phrase that Heidegger used in his essay “…poetically man dwells…”.

(c) Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 verse 26: ‘And God said: Let us make man in our image’.

(d) Holderlin seems to imply that only in the heavenly skies one can find measure, therefore introducing a metaphysical element in the poem. Werner Marx, who was the professor who took Heidegger’s teaching post at the University of Freiburg, wrote a book with the same question in its title, and “Foundations for  a nonmetaphysical ethics” as its subtitle.

(e) Holderlin translated Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus and Antigone. These translations are significant interprpetations of the works.

Notes accompanying the pictures

(1) Note  to Yves Klein’s painting: Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.(Source: MOMA)

(2) Question: On the other hand, perhaps it is Friedrich Holderlin who has organized you? Why is Friedrich Holderlin ‘Kommando’, rather than, e.g., ‘Muse’?

No. Holderlin is just one of my main heroes and he is my favorite poet in my private library. He is my choice and therefore I myself am Holderlin, I can call myself N-Holderlin, which means NASAHEIM(*)-Holderlin, a self-fullfilling prophecy of abstract art. There is no form of art without a relation towards utopia and therefore abstraction. The show is called Kommando because it was a very high or a very low order from heaven that initiated the show. Within the world of art, which is a completely useless world, a Kommando can be a group of people, or an individual that tries to find a way out of this world.

(*) “Nasaheim” – the outerspace station of Anaheim/Disneyland.

(Source: An Interview With Andre Butzer, Artist And Curator Of ‘Kommando Friedrich Holderlin’ At Max Hetzler, Berlin, Saatchi Online Magazine)

(3) This at once airy and expansive composition by Sam Francis brilliantly demonstrates the artist’s unique combination of Abstract Expressionist and late Impressionist influences. With its soft pastel palette, the monumental abstract work creates the sensation of standing before a vast and boundless space. Francis, who often found his inspiration in literary sources, titled the painting after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin which begins with the narrator looking to the sky: “In lovely blue the steeple blossoms/ With its metal roof. Around which/ Drift swallow cries, around which/ Lies most loving blue.” (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)

(4) Nolde’s landscape is a landscape dominated by the sky of North Germany, near the Danish borders, Nolde’s home.

Entierro con Lagrimas de Cera – Burial with Tears of Wax – Ενταφιασμος με Κερινα Δακρυα

This is the result of a juxtraposition of the creations of two people who have not met in their lifetime. Both made Spain their home. Both originated in another country (culture). The occasion of this is the Holy Week that is now approaching its climax. I chose to focus on the zenith of the drama, the burial. The beginning of the trip to Hades.

The creators:

El Greco, The Burial of Count Orgaz, Self-portrait (Detail)

El Greco: Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Painter.

Born in Crete, Greece, El Greco was trained as an icon painter.
It was as a painter who “felt the mystical inner construction” of life that El Greco was admired by Franz Marc and the members of the Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) school: someone whose art stood as a rejection of the materialist culture of modern life.

Source:El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (1541–1614) | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

El Lebrijano

El Lebrijano: Juan Peña Fernández. Lebrija (Seville), 1941. Singer.

García Marquez wrote: “When Lebrijano sings, water gets wet.”

(Please refer to FlamencoWorld for a biography and more).

The works:

The Burial of Count of Ortaz

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

The huge painting is in the Church of Santo Tome, in Toledo, the city that El Greco made his home in Spain.

Lagrimas de Cera (Tears of Wax)

“…The director of the company wanted to record right away and it occurred to me to say, almost as a joke, “I’m going to make a record about Holy Week.” When I was on the AVE to Seville I asked myself, “What did I say to this guy?” He called me up and said “How are you going to do it?” And I said to him, “What am I doing?” Then he said to me, “Come to Madrid because Hugo is here.”….As soon as we got there, in a recording studio on the Alameda de Hércules in Seville, we put together a multicolored musical ensemble: a Belgian producer with his French engineer, the Moroccan brothers that Juan has worked with for 10 years on strings and vocals, four Bulgarian singers, Antonio Moya de Utrera on guitar, Rosario Amador, niece of Raimundo also on vocals, and Sainkho from Southern Siberia. “It was like the U.N.,” jokes El Lebrijano.” (exerpt from an  1999 interview to Louis Clemente, published in Flamenco World)

This stunning music written for “Santa Semana” – the Holy Week – evokes the Universal aspect of Passion and Drama, universality that knows no boundaries or religions. The music unites the Christians and the Arabs with the itinerant Romas and the Jews in mourning for the Death and Burial of a Man, a God, our own.

The Video (Slide Show)

I have put together a slide show with photos of the painting, and one song from “Lαgrimas de Cera” as audio background. Here it is.

Who is the artist who should immortalize Monica Bellucci?

Back in 2009, I wrote a four part article on the Venus of Urbino, trying to answer the question: “Who is the 20th century Venus of Urbino?”. In the concluding fourth part, I nominated Monica Bellucci for the title.

In the past I have written about painting of the human boby and flesh. I consider this article to lay the foundation for the aesthetic principles to be employed here in order to nominate the artist.

Time is of the essence! If I were to start from the origins of painting and sculpture, or even from the renaissance, I would find many candidates: Titian, Michelangelo, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Degas, Rodin, and so many others.

But the artist who will immortalize of Monica must be alive today, so I need to limit my set of choices. Thankfully, there are so many, that I had to select five to be included in this article.

Cathy Wilkes, Irish, born 1966

“Cathy Wilkes’s installations of objects, readymades and paintings are formally precise and contemplative. Their essentially diaristic and self-reflective forms are composed using a complex and liberated visual language. Her work, whilst in many ways uncompromisingly introspective, is characterized by direct, almost diagrammatic invocations of daily human experience.” (Source: Tate Gallery, England)

Cathy Wilkes, Selective Memory

In 2008 she was nominated for the Turner Prize, for her solo exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, which showed “her personal approach to figurative sculpture”. She uses everyday items such as widescreen TVs and modern pushchairs in her installations. The judges of the competition said: “Through rigorous, highly-charged arrangements of commonplace objects and materials, Wilkes has developed an articulate and eloquent vocabulary that touches on issues of femininity and sexuality.”

Cathy Wilkes, We are pro choice

Ron Mueck, Australian, born 1958

Born in Australia in 1958, he has lived in the U.K. for the last 20 years but didn’t come up through the same channels as the other YBAs. Self-taught, he worked for two decades in children’s television, animatronics, and the movie industry before making his first work of art in 1996.

 

Ron Mueck, Mother and Child

You’re face to … well, something, with one of the most superrealistic sculptures you will ever see, Ron Mueck’s Mother and Child — a perfectly painted, scaled-down rendition of a supine, naked woman who has just given birth. This silicon and fiberglass resin sculpture never gives up its illusion. Mother’s arms are limp at her side, a sheen of sweat glistens on her cheek, her face is flushed and splotchy. There are bags under her eyes, stray hairs stuck in her mouth. She raises her head just enough to peer at the crinkled, crimson-colored baby crouched on her puffy belly, and gives this child — whose umbilical cord still snakes into her vagina — a look of love and incredulity. As one woman said, while peering between the mother’s legs, “It doesn’t get any more real than that.” (Jerry Saltz in artnet.)

 

Ron Mueck, Couple

 

Jeff Koons, American, born 1955

Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, Koons painted copies of the Old Masters and sold them in the furniture store owned by his father, an interior decorator.

Jeff Koons, Pink Panther

 

On the evening of 10 May 2011, Sotheby’s will offer one of the most important works by Jeff Koons ever to have appeared at auction. Pink Panther from 1988 draws on many of the themes that have come to define Koons’ output and stands as one of the outstanding achievements of his illustrious career.

Tobias Meyer, Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, says that “together with ‘Balloon Dog’ and ‘Bunny’, ‘Pink Panther’ is a 20th-century masterpiece and one of the most iconic sculptures of Jeff Koons’s oeuvre”. In a press note, Sotheby’s describes the work as “a masterpiece not only of the artist’s historic canon, but also of the epoch of recent Contemporary Art”.

Pink Panther will appear on the front and back covers of the sale catalogue for the spring Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York and is estimated to fetch $20/30 million.

Eric Fischl, American, born 1948

I encountered the work of Eric Fischl in the Brandhorst Museum, in Munich. The work that immediately impressed me was the “Japanese Bath”.

 

Eric Fischl, Japanese Bath

 

I then turned to another canvas, that was atmospheric and almost menacing. The Living Room Scene 3 of the Krefeld Project.

 

Eric Fischl, The Krefeld Project, Living Room Scene 3

 

EF: “America has a hard time with the human body and the issues surrounding the body and certainly, mortality is one of those problems.”

IS: “So much of your work has been about sexuality.”

EF: “Yes, an exploration of sexuality. And the sensuality as the experience of paint and material.”

(from an interview to Ilka Sobie, in artnet.)

 

Eric Fischl, The travel of romance I

 

The travel of romance is a set of four paintings.

 

Eric Fischl, The travel of romance II

 


Lucian Freud, English, born 1922

Lucian Freud is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, and is quite possibly the greatest living painter. He was born in Berlin in 1922.

 

Lucian Freud by Lucian Freud

On the occasion of his 2010 exhibition at the Pombidou Center in Paris, Jonathan Jones of the Guardian commented: “The revelation is that, in spite of all the technocratic global homogenisations of our age, the human being remains a vast, irreducible mystery. Freud has said he wants to make his paint as real as flesh itself, so that you see a body before you.”

Lucian Freud, Naked portrait with reflection

One of my favourite paintings of his is the “Naked Portrait with Reflection”. There is silent despair and abandonment which is exacerbated by the nakedness of the woman. And this precisely the mastery of the painter. To take the naked body in all of its mundane existence, and make it a tragic entity that oozes tension, despair, and the inevitability of death. Which in turn, makes the viewer even more moved by the body and more and more. It is a spiral that takes you to the depth of existence, inward, and more inward….

Lucian Freud, Closed Eyes

Feud has been quoted as follows: “The problem with painting a nude… is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone’s face and it imperils the sitter’s self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.”

The verdict

Who is the artist who will immoprtalize monica Bellucci? When I started the article, I wanted to leave this question unanswered.

Now that I have reached the conclusion, I would suggest that it is Eric Fischl. By process of elimination I explain:

1. Cathy Wilkes is highly intellectual. She is creating powerful figures and installations, but inside it all, you have to interpret a lot.

2. Ron Mueck is a stylist who is almost perfect, therefore bordering on the artificial.

3. Jeff Koons is so much into deconstructing reality that Monica in his hands would be a caricature, albeit a beautiful one.

4. Lucian Freud is in the final analysis treating the flesh as a fetish. There will be no place in his painting of Monica for these glorious eyes.

On the other hand, Eric Fischl is strongly rooted in the realist tradition represented by Edward Hopper and quite clearly loves women and their bodies. Yes, there may be death lurking about, but what the hell, he will miss no opportunity to enjoy and glorify the woman.   And for this reason I nominate him for Monica’s portrait.

Cy Twombly: The Rose

Cy Twombly is today one of my favorite living painters. He is an American, living in Europe and USA, and I must confess that I was not very impressed by his work, until I visited a year ago the Bandohrst Museum in Munich, Bavaria, where a lot of his paintings are exhibited, along with a few of his sculptures.

In the Brandhorst there is a room with huge canvases depicting roses. It is these pictures that started the process of my reconsideration of Twombly’s work.

Cy Twombly

The paintings in the Brandhorst are untitled, with the word “Roses” in parenthesis following the untitled.

The artist has produced another series of Roses paintings, this time with the relevant title. They were exhibited in the Gagosian Gallery in London in early 2009, with the title “The Rose”.

Untitled (Roses) – Brandhorst Museum, Munich

This is a set of five large panels, with the painter having scribbled over the paint fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems in the “Les Roses” cycle.

Titian and Twombly: the most youthful of old masters (Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, February 2009)

VI
One rose alone is all roses
and this one: irreplaceable,
perfect, the supple term
surrounded by the text of things.
How, without her and her
intermittent and continual springing forth,
could we ever express
what were our hopes.
The Rose – Gagosian Gallery

VII

Pressing you, fresh bright rose,

against my eyelid closed—

one might say a thousand

superimposed

against my warm one.

A thousand nights’ sleep

against my one pretended sleep

in which I roam

through the scented labyrinth.

The Rose (Detail)

Rose (Rilke’s epitaph)

Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one’s sleep under so
many lids

Untitled (Roses) – Brandhorst Museum

IX

Rose, so ardent and so bright

that one should call her

Saint Rose’s Reliquary…,

rose that emits this troubling scent of naked saint.

Rose nevermore tempted, disconcerting

for its internal peace; ultimate lover

so far removed from Eve, from her first awareness—

rose that infinitely possesses the loss.

I was not the only one who was and still is (even more) enthusiastic about Twombly’s work after having seen the rose, titled or untitled.

The quote from the Guardian is indicative.

Twombly is up there, with the old masters!

His hands work the paint, press it against the canvas, the sensation of the whole work is as important as the felling you get from the most minute details.

We are talking about a color master who takes us back to the Venetian School.

Abstract Expressionism comes of age and in a cyclical never ending, almost spiral pattern, joins up with Titian!

The feeling of liberation is immense.

The huge canvases absorb the vicissitudes of the world, filter out the bad stuff and exhume only the aroma of the essence of life.

La vie en rose.

Merci Mr. Twombly.

Panathinaeos Paintings IIb: Three Female Nudes for a quite Sunday evening – Updated June 2013

Today I present to you three of the  female nudes I painted over the last few years. The choice of subject was triggered by a wave of exhibitions on the nude (Nestorideion in Rhodes, Fryssira in Athens).

I start with “Red Sand”, a picture that belongs to Sahara, to the vast emptiness, to the deep contrasts. The girl is Italian, her name Antonella. She is resting after a long day, contemplating the green horizon. She covers with her body a rose given to her by her lover, who is due to arrive at any moment. the anticipation of his arrival fills the young body with adrenalin and joy. Emptiness is temporary.

Red Sand

Red Sand

Width: 100 cm Height: 60cm

Materials: Oil on canvas

In my personal collection

The second picture belongs to the 19th century. The woman in the picture, is proudly announcing to us that Khalil Bey likes her. Her name is Leila and she comes from Iran. She is resting on the pier of the main port of the island of Chios. Bodrum (Halicarnassus) is seen in the background. Khalil Bei is returning to Chios from his trip to Bodrum and Leila is full of expectations. She announces to the world that Khalil Bey likes her and in a sense anticipates that the art patron will take her with him back to Paris.

Khalil Bey likes me

Khalil Bey likes me

Width: 120 cm Height: 60cm

Materials: Acrylic on canvas

In my personal collection

Khalil Bey was a Turkish diplomat in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. He was an avid collector, and he owned “The source of Life”, the famous Courbet painting that was prohibited from public view, was acquired by Lacan, to end up in one of the bathrooms of his house.

The third picture is a picture of longing. A young woman is naked and watches out from a window.

Alicia

Alicia

Width: 80 cm Height: 100cm

Materials: Oil on canvas

In private collection

Her name is Alicia and the place is the Spanish port of Ferrol, in the Atlantic. She is married to Pedro, a military naval officer, currently on a mission to Argentina. She goes naked to the window everyday, as Pedro is for a few seconds becoming wind and comes to touch and caress her.

Painting the Human Body and Flesh

Back in 1995 I visited an exhibition of the late period Degas in the National Gallery of London. Among the works, were many with naked distorted female bodies bathing, drying themselves, combing their hair. At first it looked like the result of compulsive voyeurism of the aging artist. After having a second look, my view changed. these were not simple paintings. They were odes to the female body, poems without verses, songs without sound. The Degas pictures were wonderful sonatas, chamber music to introduce me to the complex world of painting the flesh.

The gigantic canvases where Cezanne depicted his bathers, came next in my journey of discovery of paintings depicting the body and the flesh. After the Degas chamber music, the time came for the symphony. Degas dresses his pictures with warmth and caress. The Cezanne bathers are bronze-like, and almost clumsy. These figures are not feminine in the sense that Degas’s are. In a sense they are naked Amazones, ready to fight. Some have called Cezanne’s bathers a reflection of his misoginy.

Any reference to Cezanne’s Bathers would be incomplete without the “Three Bathers”, which is the ultimate statement made by Cezanne regarding the female body and the flesh. A statement that expresses his complete lack of appreciation of the female body, in the sense that one cannot see even a fragment of passion in the endless surfaces of female flesh he put on the canvas.

The three figures are seen in a night scene, bathed in the moonlight, neglecting any bystander, focusing on their leisure and relaxation. Again there is no sign of femininity, nor of sexual appeal. The solid figures have nothing to do with the academic ideal, they are closer to ordinary working women, seen from a distance, as animals grazing the zoo’s grass.

Matisse loved women. His “Three bathers and a turtle” display his passion and love for the female body. It is like a hymn to the woman, prior to his painting the “Joy of life”.

The joy of life of radiant Mediterranean colours gives its place to the introspection of Central Europe and the tension of Expressionism.

The contours of the body are shores containing the waves of passion and desire.

The European North in the face of Munch makes the body a continent of rivers, lakes, mountains.

Lucian Freud, the grand child of Sigmund, brings the earth on the body, makes it a fertile field.

Francis Bacon makes the body a field of horrors. Deformation, dicease, decasy, and ultimately Death inhabit the canvas.

Jenny Saville paints herself and her sister as twins, and the canvas erupts with color gradations.

Saville’s self portrait is a scream. Her flesh melts like ice cream, it floats on dirty air.

David Hockney’s Teressa is a collage that invites us to rethink the space and the body.

It is time for the spirit and the bodies of the women already depicted to exit the scene. No other than Marel Duchamp is directing their grand exit down the stairs.

Flying Words – Επεα Πτεροεντα

1. I emerge from the depths

From the cool of the ocean beds, back to the warm and painful sun.

I have to re-open my eyes and see  around me.

I have to face reality again, as painful as it is.

2. I am sad

Three people died for nothing.

and it is not enough anymore to accuse the hooligans.

I am sad

The country is in the middle of a huge crisis and most of the politicians are playing games.

I am sad.

The problems we are facing are enormous but it seems that no one in Greece is responsible for them.

And no one is going to be punished.

3. I am confused

“How can a hand made Molotov, or two, or three, burn a three story building to the extent that three employees suffocate and  die?

What about fire protection systems?

Why isn’t there any public statement about them? “

I cannot comprehend the facts

A proper fire protection system in the building would have been activated automatically seconds after the Molotovs were thrown in the building and the fire would have been extinguished almost immediately.

Why didn’t this happen?

It is easy to talk about the unknown hooligans who threw the Molotovs. but how is Justice served when the Management of the Bank has not answered some simple questions?

For example, were there or not sprinklers installed in the building?

4. I am angry

“The fire brigade had never issued an operating license to the building in question.

The agreement for it to operate was under the table, as it practically happens with all businesses and companies in Greece.”

Source: Void Network

Where is the Public Prosecutor?

When a strong Earthquake hit Athens in 1999 and buildings collapsed, there were inquiries about the extent to which the Civil Enginners and Constructors had followed the relevant regulations.

What is going to happen now?

5. I want to cry

For the three dead.

For the cover up that I foresee.

For the continuing decline of our society not only in financial but also in moral and cultural terms.

6. Best wishes to the mothers of the world

Happy Mother’s Day!

Painter Valias Semertzides – Ο ζωγραφος Βαλιας Σεμερτζιδης

Σημερα τιμω τον οικογενειακο φιλο και μεγαλο ζωγραφο Βαλια Σεμερτζιδη. Σε μερες δυσκολες που παραδερνουμε και βολοδερνουμε, χωρις οραματα, χωρις αξιες,  η δουλεια και η κληρονομια του Σεμερτζιδη αποτελουν σημειο αναφορας για εναν Ελληνισμο που μπορει να παει μπροστα.

Γεννημενος στον Καυκασο το 1911 απο Ελληνοποντιο πατερα και Καυκασια μητερα, ερχεται στην Ελλαδα το 1923.  Η οικογενεια της μητερας του ειχε τεραστια κτηματικη περιουσια, την οποια και εχασε μετα την Οκτωβριανη Επανασταση.

Στη δεκαετια του 1930 ο Σεμερτζιδης ειναι στη Σχολη Καλων Τεχνων του ΕΜΠ και γινεται μαθητης του Αλεξανδρινου Κωνσταντινου Παρθενη, που τον επηρεασε βαθυτατα.

Η ζωγραφικη του καρριερα στο ξεκινημα της σημαδευεται απο την συμμετοχη του σε μια μεγαλη εκθεση στο Παρισι το 1937, με το εργο “Βραχος στο Αιγαλεω”.

Πριν ξεσπασει ο Δευτερος ΠΑγκοσμιος Πολεμος και στην Ελλαδα, βρισκει την ευκαιρια να ζωγραφισει τον φιλο του Νικο Καββαδια.

Μετα την εναρξη του Πολεμου, ο Σεμερτζιδης εντασσεται στον ΕΛΑΣ και πηγαινει στη Βινιανη, στην Ευρυτανια, κι αργοτερα στα Αγραφα.

Εκει αποθανατιζει τους αγωνιστες και τη ζωη τους. Στην φωτογραφια του Σπυρου Μελετζη, ο Σεμερτζιδης ζωγραφιζει τον Λεοντα, ενω ο Αρης Βελουχιωτης παρακολουθει.

Ο Σεμερτζιδης απεικονιζει  την ανθρωπινη φιγουρα και το προσωπο με αδρες λιτες γραμμες και συνθεσεις.

Η πολυπλοκοτητα παραφυλαει, αλλα δεν παρεισφρυει.

Οι ανθρωπινες φιγουρες του Σεμερτζιδη ειναι σαν αγαλματα. Ακομη κι οταν κινουνται ειναι καπου αλλου, σε ενα αλλο κοσμο. Η δωρικη λιτοτητα και ισως και μια αυστηροτητα αγκαλιαζουν τις ανθρωπινες φιγουρες του Σεμερτζιδη.

Απο την αλλη μερια, στα τοπια του Σεμερτζιδη κυριαρχει το χρωμα και το συναισθημα.

Ο Σεμερτζιδης απο το 1963 εγκαθισταται στη Ροδο οπου και παραμενει μεχρι τις αρχες της δεκαετιας του 1980.

Ερωτευεται τα τοπια, με κορυφαιο ισως τον ορεινο ογκο του Ατταβυρου, του ψηλοτερου και μεγαλυτερου ορους της Ροδου, τον οποιο και απεικονισε πλειστακις.

Ο Σεμερτζιδης εκτος απο ζωγραφος ηταν και χαρακτης. Η ικανοτητα του να μεταβαινει απο τα πλουσια χρωματικα τοπια στα συγκρατημενα χαρακτικα τοπια ηταν μοναδικος.

Γνωρισα τον Σεμερτζιδη στη Ροδο, καθως ηταν φιλος των γονεων μου. Θυμαμαι εναν ιδιαιτερα ευγενικο σεμνο ανθρωπο, παντα με το χαμογελο, και μια ζεστη φωνη. Ειχε ενα σπιτι κοντα στο χωριο της Κρεμαστης, γεματο φως. Ακομη και τα χειμωνιατικα απογευματα που τον επισκεπτομαστε το σπιτι ειχε φως.

Ο Σεμερτζιδης ταξιδεψε το 1983. Το 1985 εγινε στην γκαλερι Νεες Μορφες μια πολυ ομορφη εκθεση εργων του, απο την οποια και αναρτω την συνοπτικη παρουσιαση με κειμενο της Τζουλιας Δημακοπουλου.