“I was once a boy, a girl, a tree, a bird and a silent fish in the depths of the sea”

Empedocles, 5th century BC, On Purifications

The Galleria Tommaso Calabro is pleased to present “Fassianos”, a monographic exhibition dedicated to Alekos Fassianos (1935-2022), one of the most celebrated and influential artists in the Greek artistic scenario. The exhibition opening coincides with the launch of the Alekos Fassianos Museum, a modernist building jointly conceived in the 1990s by Alekos Fassianos and architect Kyriakos Krokos.&#x20;

“Fassianos” is the first solo show dedicated to the artist in Italy, nearly forty years after his last exhibition organised by Alexander Iolas at the Galleria Paolo Barozzi in Milan in 1976. With this exhibition, the Galleria Tommaso Calabro continues its research on the work of Iolas – one of the most important gallerists and art dealers of the twentieth century – and those artists close to Surrealism, whom Iolas helped and supported with visionary intuition through his international network of galleries.&#x20;

The exhibition “Fassianos” presents over forty paintings and works on paper executed between the end of the 1960s and the early 2000s, alongside a selection of rare design pieces.&#x20;

Born in Athens into a cultured family – his father was a musician and his mother taught ancient Greek – Fassianos developed a vision combining memory and mythology, the sacred and the profane. Although embedded with references to Greek culture, his imaginary transcends the personal to become universal and timeless. The color is the absolute protagonist of Fassianos’ work: intense blues and reds, ancient pinks and deep greens, silvery and golden hues dance across the canvas to shape bodies and faces, wings, swallows and flowers.&#x20;

Fassianos’ figures, androgynous and hieratic, come from the artist’s childhood memories, inhabiting a rarefied and imaginative dimension where bodies of passers-by merge with Classical profiles and Byzantine mosaics; the same that Fassianos used to admire as a child in Greek museums and churches, which he used to visit with his mother and his grandfather, who was a priest.

Whether they are seen as men, angels or gods, the difference between Fassianos’ figures lays in the details: in the striped shorts, the pearl necklaces, the bushy wings of candid doves. They inhabit the same universe, yet each one of them bear his own joys and sins, as we all do: a kiss, a drink on the terrace, a ride on a bicycle, the hair blowing in the hot summer wind.&#x20;

Fassianos was an extremely polyhedric man. The same iconographic imaginary of his paintings is to be found in his design pieces, executed with the most diverse materials, from wood to bronze, from rattan to ceramic: elegant and eclectic works, which evoke an oneiric aesthetics imbued with a striking lyricism.

The Galleria Tommaso Calabro is grateful to the Alekos Fassianos Estate, Athens, for making this exhibition possible, and to Carwan Gallery, Athens, for its support in including Fassianos’ design pieces in the show.&#x20;


Fassianos

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