Nikos Aslanidis – Inventor of Images

What paintings are these that are so distant and unsettling and at the same time touch one so closely?

Their darkness, the indefinable space in which the figures or individual faces appear in sharp light or blurred uncertainty, the details of their clothing – all this withdraws them from any assignable time. Nikos Aslanidis’s paintings are three hundred years old and yet new and wholly modern. They merit the name “oil painting” rather more than do the works of many other contemporary artists who apply oil or acrylic colour to canvas. The immediacy to life and intense emotionality of his figures do not leave the viewer cold. The paintings have a powerful presence; their figures are statements of the human – which is surprising in view of the fact that they do not portray real people. The subjects of these paintings are imagined; paradoxically they are both individuals and types. What Nikos Aslanidis’s work so uncompromisingly presents is not a pre-existent reality – it is a profoundly human one.

It might help when looking at these paintings to read Samuel Beckett – I’m thinking especially of the late works, after “Endgame” – for example the 1960 Theater piece “Rough for Theatre I”. The characters in this short piece have no names, just the letters A und B. They are marked by life, impoverished, in some way or other disabled (blind, wheelchair-reliant), impaired in their mobility and activity. They speak in short staccato sentences or utter only single words. They have left everything conceivable behind them and have little remaining – nomaterial things and little time – to...

Their darkness, the indefinable space in which the figures or individual faces appear in sharp light or blurred uncertainty, the details of their clothing – all this withdraws them from any assignable time. Nikos Aslanidis’s paintings are three hundred years old and yet new and wholly modern. They merit the name “oil painting” rather more than do the works of many other contemporary artists who apply oil or acrylic colour to canvas. The immediacy to life and intense emotionality of his figures do not leave the viewer cold. The paintings have a powerful presence; their figures are statements of the human – which is surprising in view of the fact that they do not portray real people. The subjects of these paintings are imagined; paradoxically they are both individuals and types. What Nikos Aslanidis’s work so uncompromisingly presents is not a pre-existent reality – it is a profoundly human one.

It might help when looking at these paintings to read Samuel Beckett – I’m thinking especially of the late works, after “Endgame” – for example the 1960 Theater piece “Rough for Theatre I”. The characters in this short piece have no names, just the letters A und B. They are marked by life, impoverished, in some way or other disabled (blind, wheelchair-reliant), impaired in their mobility and activity. They speak in short staccato sentences or utter only single words. They have left everything conceivable behind them and have little remaining – no material things and little time – to live. They exist in an almost empty space. Yet paradoxically, the atmosphere of poverty and loss Beckett creates, reinforces the intensity of life in such circumstances – and this is also the case with the paintings of Nikos Aslanidis. His figures stand or sit for the most part in indecipherable emptiness, alone even when there are two of them.

(Kay Heymer)