In his work the artist creates mental and allegorical landscapes and treads the space between the real or the objective and the imaginative or free-associative.
Christos Athanassiadis
Where personal and collective memory meet
Text: Alexandra Koroxenidis
Based on the tradition set by the great master painters of the past, Christos Athanassiadis (born 1967) also looks at well-known works of literature and poetry for universal and timeless concepts. He draws inspiration mainly from Italian Renaissance art which he had the chance to admire while studying Art in Italy and also addresses existential issues.
“Through chance meetings with the History of Art but primarily by bringing together literature and the visual, I seek to feature a contemporary vision and to incorporate the representational modes of the past into the present […] Contemporary form encompasses a way of life and all the visual cues that surround us, such as graphics, digital reality, the urban environment, fragmentation, the colors we see.”
In his work, the artist creates mental and allegorical landscapes and treads the space between the real or the objective and the imaginative or free-associative. Without illustrating and by combining figuration with abstraction, he approaches a literary text or the allusions to a work of art as cultural imprints and as collective memory, which he then deconstructs and melds with his own experiences and memories.
Following this approach, he reconfigures photographs of movie scenes through painting. In Soul Diaries (2000, a nominee for the 2001 DESTE prize) he creates an ensemble of overpainted images from film stills which he presented in a video installation of the actual film stills. Also part of the work was a diary-album consisting of the painted-over images on the front page and written phrases on the back of the same image. This was one of the artist’s early attempts at unifying dispersed references and at transforming the fleeting moment into a temporality that unifies past, present, and future.
In his work, he creates an interplay between the past and the present. The recent series Apocalypsis (2025), for example, reinterprets selected scenes from Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut series based on the Book of Revelation. The flat, vivid colors are meant as a contemporary imitation of stained glass that brings light into an inner space that is also spiritual.
Having observed that Dürer’s lines have no beginning or end, Athanassiadis draws vertical, large-scale works where the diagonal lines and the fluid, converging forms seem as if in movement of a dramatic intensity. They explode in different parts of the composition, turning into fragments and creating, for the first time in his work, such a great degree of abstraction. They also convey a metaphysical vision made all the more alive through the illusion that they extend beyond the pictorial surface. This results in a composition that seems surreal, artificial, as well as divine — as if from heaven.
At the same time, the paintings of Christos Athanassiadis focus on timeless dualities, on life’s inherent contradictions, on the aspects of human nature: love and death, transcendence, violence, the sacred — and they always contain an indirect political content. A characteristic example is The Cloven Knight (2011–2012) series, with its allegorical, imaginary elements transposed from Italo Calvino’s The Cloven Viscount from the author’s trilogy Our Ancestors (the painting’s title also refers to The Nonexistent Knight of the same trilogy).
Through chance meetings with the History of Art but primarily by bringing together literature and the visual, I seek to feature a contemporary vision and to incorporate the representational modes of the past into the present […] Contemporary form encompasses a way life and all the visual cues that surround us, such as graphics, digital reality, the urban environment, fragmentation, the colors we see.
Athanassiadis appropriates motifs from the work of the great Venetian Renaissance painters Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio. He revives the truth of human nature, divided between good and evil, and points to the disengagement from stereotypes as a means of liberation. He merges form and content: by creating different perspectives of space within the painting, he alludes to fragmentation but also suggests that the work is open to different interpretations. Nothing is finite or static. Appearance presupposes concealment.
This may explain why the works of Christos Athanassiadis always imply an undefined loss, a subdued remembrance of a past presence that lives on as a trace in life and in material things. An example is the painting series Nevermore (2008), inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. The imagery subverts the conventional sense of nature as a refuge and parallels war’s violence with the otherworldly, eerie aspect of nature — but also refers to nature’s man-incurred destruction. And while violence is meant as a constituent element of man, the works’ imposing presence also posits strength and vitality as an opposing force. The overall effect is that of a balance found in all of the artist’s works — between loss and life, trauma and its necessary acceptance or erasure.
In the painting series Paradise Lost (2019, from John Milton’s poem), the fall from paradise symbolizes the loss of an ideal, man’s passage from domestic protection to society, as well as a metaphor of free will that prompts the search for life’s — destined to remain hidden — meaning. In one of the works in the series, the railway tracks — a metaphor for the course of life — seem to extend far into the depth of the painting towards an unknown destination or a never-ending itinerary. They may also suggest painting’s constant struggle for representing the inexpressible and invisible.
The use of a single color in several of his works contributes to a oneiric, unreal impression. “Raphael’s drawings inspired me to work many series in one color. I wished to convey the sense of time’s patina that causes colors to fade. Having made my own canvas, I cover it with one color, and on that surface I then start drawing with charcoal. Sometimes I continue with color on top of the charcoal or leave the sketched lines and use color to fill in the shapes.” In his monochromatic paintings, hues of red, blue-vermilion, or ochre yellow spread like a veil — like a haze from which the image seems to both emerge in the foreground and subside into the surface, on the threshold between the real and the imaginary and dreamlike.
It is in this mode that Athanassiadis painted the series Cities (2004), for which he based himself on the photographs he took of cities he visited or old postcards. “When I see a city, I dream of its color. In this series, the human figure is absent. I think of the image as a screen on which all of the things that happen may not be represented but become alive in the viewer’s imagination. There is an implicit narrative, like in literature and poetry.” Cities hide secrets. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the paintings (of nine cities in total) reveal the city as a psychological landscape and prompt philosophical reflections on the meaning of topos in relationship with time, travel, desire and memory, the familiar and the foreign.
After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, where he lived until 2000, he returned to Athens where he is represented by a.antonopoulou.art. He was a nominee for the DESTE 2001 prize and has held eight solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad, while also participating in several group exhibitions and other events such as: An Outing (2006, an exhibition by the Beltsios Collection), Fresh Paint (2018, Tel Aviv Museum of Natural History), Athina by Art (2004), Remap 4 (2013, in the context of the Athens Biennial), and ARCO (2004, Madrid).
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