EDITORIAL

Mataroa sailing
Bold, modern artistic creation is a prophetic reflection of what lies ahead in the course of time. The artist, surpassing through the veneers, penetrates within with a prescient gaze and augurs the future, transforms it into art and presents it to the world, revealing its prospective face: deplorable,  grandiose, glorious, complicated, tragic and sanguine.

Or, it works all at once interchangeably and in unexpected sequences.  In art, everything has already been said in a multitude of ways, yet nothing has actually been said.  Every generation, in every era, relives the perennial question of existence and has a given right to provide its own flesh, purpose and endless interpretations to the conundrum of its livelihood. New insights and habits, an ever-alert technology, fluid correlations, new illusions and fresh hopes, threats and safeguards, conveniences and stalemates, these all impel the artists who give their whole being, striving to boldly express the ineffable, bring life to the new, the invisible, the innately effulgent.

Art tells all that is as of yet untold, brings on unforeseen awe through original forms, conjunctures, unexpected and original mixes, ruptures and paths and spring forth almost out of nowhere to reveal the glaring wordlessness of the new times.

 Mataroa magazine, setting sail twice a year from Thessaloniki to the rest of the world, not only aspires to, but is behooved to serve as a vessel, an ark if you will, to transport artists from the outskirts of a globalized planet to the centers of influence and decision making: artists living and inscribing art within the range of the Mataroa compass can reach their destinations much sooner, may they aim for New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Brussels, Madrid, anywhere their art is desired.

Besides, the name Mataroa, which is symbolically, but nonetheless respectfully, appropriated by this periodical, is the name of a vessel which in the year 1945 transported about 200 Greek intellectuals and budding artists from Athens to the port of Taranta in Italy, with Paris being their final destination, saving them from the savages of the civil war that had just erupted in Greece. This voyage was carried out under the order of Octave Merlier, the then-director of the Institute Francais d’Athenes. Just how insightful and astute the French philhellene’s initiative was can be attested by the fact that those women and men abroad the Mataroa who subsequently reached Paris, marked European intellectual thought and culture in the 20^th century.

Prior to setting sail for our own Mataroa, we were at ground zero and released an experimental issue entitled Arti. Now embarking on its maiden voyage, Mataroa travels under adverse weather just as its namesake once did, carrying the deserving work of new and pioneering artists beyond Greece and onto the major capitals of the world.  Over and above, the departure, the voyage, the open horizon, the quest, the communication, the discovery, these are all key components of another famous archetypal Hellene known throughout the world: Homer’s Odysseus, whose journey and adventures are everlasting.