Contemporary Artifacts

Figure and Form, curated by Paul Laster — an exhibition of paintings by the late Nassos Daphnis (1914-2010) and sculptures by George Petrides (b. 1964) — facilitates a contemporary visual dialogue between two Greek-American artists who reference their place of origin.

Installation view

Daphnis’s Pixel Field paintings, made between 1987 and 1992, provide a setting for Petrides’s sculptures. The computer-generated graphics that inspired these paintings were created on Daphnis’s son’s Atari ST— a precursor to new media art. The compositions seem inspired by the Mediterranean cityscape and sea. Vibrant colors of land, water, and sky are rendered in large blocks that resemble hard-edged color field abstraction more than any natural setting. One painting, 1-89 (1989), is even further removed from nature, with its squares and rectangles broken up by similarly blocky ellipses that show the affordances of the era’s computers: what looks retro and pixelated today was once the height of computer graphics technology.

Nassos Daphnis, 1-90, 1990, oil on canvas, 36.13 x 44.13 in.

Petrides’s sculptures come to life juxtaposed with Daphnis’s digitized environments: the geometric settings give way to the rough surfaces of the figures. This pairing exposes the slippages in time and space that occur when creating something new while referencing an ancient past. The artists were both born in Greece but they are émigrés; New Yorkers. Their memories of childhood and youth are distant, mixed with new experiences abroad. They visited their homeland as Americans, filtering Greece through a Greek-American lens – not fully belonging in their place of origin or their adopted home. They viewed Greece simultaneously as insiders and outsiders.

George Petrides, Detail of The Sicilian (Paola), 2021, natural clay, epoxy clay, and paint, 16 x 15.5 in.

There have been many works of art that reinterpret and reimagine Greek antiquities. George Petrides’s sculptures filter the ancient Greek sculptural tradition through the contemporary gaze of an artist in New York City. His work has been inspired by childhood museum visits where art, to him, was not “Greek Art:” it was a part of his ancestry. While others attempt to create connections with Greece as the birthplace of democracy and the early aesthetic standard of Western art, Petrides felt a personal connection to the artworks themselves.

Classical Greek sculpture depicted an idealized, youthful physical form. The stiff Egyptian-inspired Kouros evolved into the life-like proportions of the Hellenic period. The Polykleitos Canon, influenced by the philosophy and mathematical theory of Pythagoras and the Platonic ideal form, placed emphasis on number, harmony, and beauty in Classical sculpture. Greek bronze sculptures were copied in marble by the Romans and the forms found a revival during the Renaissance and subsequent eras. The classical form inspired the Übermensch ideal of Arno Breker’s public works that were endorsed as the Classical antithesis to “degenerate” art. The physique of the American comic book superhero emerged from the idealized form as well. Even today, some may describe an athletic body who approaches the Classical physical ideal as “having the body of a Greek God.”

George Petrides, Boxer at Rest (Self Portrait), 2021, natural clay, epoxy clay, metals, patinas, and brick, 14.5 x 10.5 in.

Petrides subverts the ideal of physical perfection, laying bare the vulnerability and imperfection of contemporary urbanites. His figures, which are modeled from himself and his peers, strive for honesty rather than mathematical perfection. While ancient sculptures looked outward to the gods, Petrides looks inward: at himself and his models. The sculptures not only suggest a patina of time but the effects of life and an unsure environment where people search for answers within.

In Boxer at Rest (Self Portrait) (2021) the artist subverts the Classical ideal of physical perfection through a realistic representation of his body. While based on a Greek bronze from between 330 and 50 BCE, Petrides’s boxer is no longer a Hellenistic depiction of a youthful athlete but of a New Yorker shaped by the stressful life of the city and time. The realism of the folds makes one reflect upon how our bodies change with age and, most recently, the pandemic. Layers of multicolored clay and paint give the sculpture a patina and rough surface that suggests the aging of the work – like an artifact unearthed.

George Petrides, Graphic Designer (Frances), 2022, natural clay, epoxy clay, and dairy milk, 6 x 13.5 in.

The sculpture Graphic Designer (Frances) (2022) has been soaked in dairy milk while still warm after firing, adding an uneven white surface tone on top of the bare terra cotta. The technique of applying milk post-firing not only gives the finished piece a milky color but fills the pores of unglazed ceramics to make them more water-tight. When used a glaze, the surface darkens due to the caramelization of the sugars while fats help create the seal. Petrides accomplishes an uneven patina – a visual link with an ancient technique.

George Petrides, Ajitto, 2022, bronze with custom patinas, 9.5 x 8.5 in. Photograph by Paul Laster.

The sole bronze sculpture in the exhibition, Ajitto (2022) was influenced by a contemporary ideal form – the Black male athletic body. Inspired by the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the black patina of the version on display emulates the beauty of Black skin depicted in Mapplethorpe's photographic works. Mapplethorpe himself was influenced by classical ideals of beauty, going so far as to have some of his models mimic poses from classical and Renaissance sculptures. The photographer also photographed sculptures, imbuing them with a lifelike quality that differed from his statuesque models like Ajitto. Mapplethorpe once said: “If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.”

The sliced arm — suggesting the damaged Belvedere Torso (circa 1st century BCE) — in Kevin Belvedere (2022) evokes a visceral response in the viewer. The famed sculpture has inspired artists since ancient times: Michelangelo thought the ruined sculpture was perfection itself and turned down a commission from the Pope to recreate its severed limbs. The torso represents the limits of the classical ideal, its imperfections and omissions being ultimately more compelling than any imaginary whole. The slice through the multicolored layers of clay in Petrides’s interpretation of the torso suggests a violent act resulting in exposed bone and muscle tissue. The color change hints at a previous state of completion that has been lost forever to time and ruin.

George Petrides, Kevin Belvedere, 2022, natural clay, epoxy clay, metals, patinas, and brick, 16 x 12 in.

Beyond the artists’ common homeland, an awareness of artifice, and the physical presence of various personal, technological, and cultural histories, link these two otherwise disparate bodies of work. Daphnis’s paintings, plotted out with a now-archaic computer — itself an artifact — and executed by hand, show evidence of early computer graphics technology in their colored blocks and squares. Petrides’s sculptures not only resemble artifacts unearthed from an ancient civilization but are themselves emblems of the artist’s life, depicting people close to him and referencing classicism’s influence on the art historical canon, like the Belvedere Torso or Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Each work on view displays not only its artist’s personal history, or a fragment of a larger cultural history, but the intimate history of its facture — whether it was cast in bronze, bathed in milk, or painted based on shapes from the flickering screen of an Atari ST computer.

Figure and Form
Consulate of Greece in New York
69 East 79th Street, NY NY 10075
December 16, 2021, to February 3, 2022
Weekdays 9 to 2:30 PM