Human, All Too Human

“From the perspective of the Nietzschean tragic hero, in painting, I myself would be that hero.” These are the words of Dionisis Christofilogiannis, whose painting exhibition, Apollonian Dionysian Dichotomy, can be visited at the Cluj Arts Museum these days. Constantly in search of his own identity, the Greek artist is one of the few people who are still aware, still questioning, who are still self-aware, still wondering. And I'm not saying it for the dramatic effect, not out of the fatalism of the one who intensely feels that he was born in the wrong times. I'm saying it because it is difficult to see, in any type of works of art nowadays, not only painting, works that treat in a human manner certain topics and questions that are fundamental to the evolution of humanity ever since its beginnings. The breath of fresh air I got with Dionisis Christofilogiannis' painting resides in his approach of the Apollonian-Dionysian dynamics – a very personal, we may even say intimate approach, which does not reduce to abstract but, on the contrary, brings things closer, materialises them; an approach which primarily presses with extreme discretion on an invisible “accelerator pedal”: in a world of terrible comminution, rattles and shouts coming from everywhere around, the artist introduces us to a series of paintings that speak of the constants of the human soul, of the still existent possibility of perfectly human experience in the eternal fluctuation between the squaring solitude and self-obliteration.

Beyond the horizontal bar-lines chosen by Dionisis Christofilogiannis as shape to present his works, resides the intimist psychology of the man who, although caught in the nebular game of modern world, cultivates (his own) escape in the redeeming geometry of the Olympus. There a sort of escapism in the carnality, in the sexuality and the primarily Dionysian ecstasy accomplished through fine arts themselves, patronised by Apollo in Greek mythology. Apollonian Dionysian Dichotomy, the result of several years of research conducted by the Greek painter, beyond the study of the inner mechanisms creating the Greek mythology, an introspection into self, an attempt to self-definition in the terms of the hyper-lucid dream and of ecstatic intoxication, as it is not the abstraction of the God we are introduced to, but the carnality in the modern man figures in their most mundane stances. The works are not an attempt to recover a lost world, but on the contrary, a confirmation of the presence of archetypal mechanisms in contemporary world. The insularity of modern world hides the same permanent creation structure, the same permanent game between the Apollonian and the Dionysian: the same universe that will always allow us to escape in solitude, but a solitude always fertile – the solitude which will unceasingly return to us the intimate violence of the inner flow of liberty and through it the objectifying and squaring power – „principium individuationis” the very basis of the idea of the Apollonian. This is where the principle of individuation falls apart, along with self-obliteration in ecstatic intoxication, the burst of the ritual feast of art on Dionysian grounds, just as escapism into solitude rises from the very core of ecstasy, for the man, like the ancient Ouroboros symbol, continually re-creates himself in a continual fluctuation of intoxication and dive into hyper-lucidity. And Dionisis Christofilogiannis' universe, that where Apollo's brush cyclically meets Dionysus' lascive music is nothing else but an endeavour of self-knowledge of the artist, in its most intimate psychical and physical mechanisms, in the essential mechanisms of ascent and descent, of frenetic burst and candle light immuring – and endeavour that doesn't, after all, aim at anything else but investigate the human on its own territory: that of the eternal dance.