Remembrance of fire

Texts

From the Ashes of Creation: Exploring the Personal Exhibition of Visual Artist and Museologist George Merianos

 

George Merianos' inaugural solo exhibition presents a poignant and narrative exploration of the devastating reality of vegetative decomposition amidst wildfires. His artworks serve as a powerful metaphor for the internal fragmentation of a society alienated from nature. As individuals confront the ferocity of these natural disasters, they are forced to recognize their inextricable connection to the natural world. Consequently, images of destruction and decay are indelibly imprinted upon the collective unconscious. Inspired by contemporary events and numerous natural calamities, particularly wildfires that have ravaged both domestic and global landscapes, the artist delves into the individual and collective trauma resulting from these burned forests (Laugharne et al., 2011; Shultz et al., 2013).

The artist's technique, employing fumage to subtly scorch paper (a derivative of wood), charcoal and ash for detailed rendering, and scratching to fragment the material, attests to the immediacy and visceral expression with which he conveys material decomposition. The raw, primal materials serve to vividly evoke the violence of fire. These experimental and unconventional techniques (the eschewal of traditional oil paints), reminiscent of Arte Povera, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Land Art (Andrews, 2006), dramatically underscore themes of decay, loss, and suffering. The grayish waves of smog, the jagged branches of trees desperately seeking refuge from the fiery inferno, and the enveloping darkness created by dense smoke crystallize the artist's lament and anguish, evoking the swirling eddies of Turner and the mystical visions of Kandinsky (Warburton, 2008; Messer, 1997).

As a contemporary naturalist and observer, Merianos masterfully blends an otherworldly, illusionistic atmosphere with meticulous details of the plant world, such as the charred leaf of a plane tree. The branches, trunks, and foliage of trees are rendered with naturalistic precision, yet simultaneously appear muted and abstract at their extremities, as if submerged in a haze of smoke and ash. The detailed depiction of burning grasses reveals an in-depth study of the plant kingdom and herbs, while the rough textures and stark color contrasts evoke the landscape compositions of Lucian Freud. The originality of these works is striking, as they seamlessly transition from realistic to psychedelic and hallucinatory, blurring the lines between the representational and the abstract, thereby captivating the viewer.

In essence, the artist's endeavor is an internal voice of psychosocial awareness that transforms loss into creation while simultaneously denouncing contemporary human intervention in the ecosystem (Cosimo, 2023; Conn Sarah, 2010). The artworks reflect a visual and introspective process of mourning, expressing a protest against humanity's alienation from nature. However, just as art can soothe and mitigate destruction, nature possesses its own mechanisms of healing, regeneration, and restoration, an invitation to which Merianos urges us all to contribute. Moreover, the artist's hometown of Lamia, situated at a crossroads between regions ravaged by natural disasters such as Attica and Euboea, and at the foot of the imposing Oiti mountain range, seems to subconsciously inspire his work. This mountainous region, with its idyllic and breathtaking geomorphology and biodiversity, serves as a backdrop for the artist's exploration of ecological concerns. In conclusion, the body of artwork constitutes an internal projection of the artist's ecological anxieties through a dramatized landscape."

 

Marios Giotakis

Psychologist/Art Historian/Archaeologist/Museologist

COMBURSTION AS NARRATIVE

A deeply transformative process of matter, combustion, in every form, morphologically transforms both the elements that directly fuel it and the broader space that becomes its field of action each time, constituting a significant catalyst in the transformation of the landscape both in its expanded real dimension and in the symbolic. Whether caused by natural causes, or whether the initial - "generative" and inevitably destructive - spark has been caused by intentional or unintentional human activity, every fire, as an uncontrollable destructive event or as part of cultural practice, inevitably offers on the next day new images and experiences to human senses: those of a complete transformation of material objects, where, along with the irreversible absence of their former forms, new presences emerge such as smoke, soot, embers, ash, and carbon. Able to shrink, disappear, alter, diminish, pulverize, transform the structure, composition and resistance of materials, in some paradoxical cases contributing to their salvation, fire has been a landmark in the biography of both forested areas and settlements, buildings and monuments, marking the mnemonic dimension of natural and inhabited places and dramatically determining their historical evolution.

Passing through all the above dimensions of fire, Giorgos Merianou's artistic gesture makes the materials themselves the first-person narrators of their fiery experience and valuable witnesses of their forced evolution into a new morphological version. Achieving the necessary temporal compressions on the painted surface, the dramatic adventure of the materials is rendered simultaneously as an event in progress, and as an already completed episode, with the narrative running through and synthesizing the successive dramaturgical acts of the destructive transformation that it ultimately narrates: the materials struggle, fight, create clusters and formations, rise, extend, bend, resist, succumb. At the same time, the eye detects, as already present, the emerging images of the next day: the living form is already dry, the incandescent is already charred, the air that caused the vortex subsides leaving the smell of the burnt to dominate the space, while the wood, the branch, the leaf are forever deprived of their juices that previously ran through the "body" of the tree. Behind the new, imposed by the fire "monochromes" of the landscape, a rich field of subtle shades emerges, perceptible but also imperceptible, tonal gradations, a suggestive set of countless painterly qualities that the eye is called to traverse with the careful step of a traveler who silently explores a recently burned place with the heat still alive in its entrails.

The artist's project goes so far as to dare the punctual rupture of the canvas itself in the small areas that "burned" - with or without quotation marks - since, both in terms of photographic and pictorial art, and in realistic terms, they have retreated under the power of fire. These points, true openings in the pictorial space, provide visual access to a further field and an imminent dimension that emerges from behind the visible and obvious, constituting an allegory of the white, inaccessible core of heat and light, the "center of the sun" that it is neither possible to approach nor to behold with the naked eye, just like a sacred, inaccessible, unspeakable area. A visual artist who in the mid-20th century followed the searches of spazialismo (spatial art), would see in these bold points of rupture of the canvas, the liminal gates of the unification of the pictorial space, the abolition of any limitation.

Integrated into the consistent artistic path that Giorgos Merianou has been following for years, starting from nature and the deeply contradictory ways in which human culture chooses to dialogue with it, "Memory" is a visual unit that eloquently condenses the contemporary anxiety for the fate of not only areas with a forested character, but for the earth as a whole, as a field of survival and co-existence. At the same time, the works of the "Memory" unit, enclosing many more narratives, memories and admissions, open in their own peculiar way and through their carefully selected visual means, the appropriate openings - gates so that the narration reaches much further back, to the anguished existential questions about life and death, the violence of destruction and the possibility of preventing it, the struggle of the immaterial with the material, of the wind with the flame and finally with fire as an archetypal act of survival and destruction, ritual and act of purification, as cultural oblivion and as cellular memory.

Christina Mavini 

Archaeologist-Museologist Education Curator at MOMus - Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki

About the Painted Impressions of Fire

The present works refer to and concern the pictorial representation of what we call fire. Their narrative unfolds through the correlation of the subject matter with the materials and techniques employed.

Charcoal, ash, and the marks of smoke hover between their literal existence as materials and their poetic potential within the realm of painting. They were never processed to maximize their function as pigments, as a commercial oil paint might be. Instead, they underwent a partial and selective treatment aimed at a dual purpose: to be applied to the painting surface as means of visualization and projection, while simultaneously retaining their presence. In other words, they exist as entities distinguished by their inherent, qualitative, formal characteristics, named and activated meaningfully as points. Beyond the potential contexts they may carry within their exhibition, they also testify, through their very essence, to the act of combustion and the loss of forms. Rather than being left to the earth to continue participating in the flow of nature, they are solidified as painterly traces of the theme of fire. Perhaps this solidification serves as a resistance to oblivion, to the periodic silencing of forest fires, and to the normalization of a cultural trauma experienced by a society that has been witnessing the loss of greenery for several years. In this particular work, a few discreet green touches have been added.

This text is an attempt to consciously articulate intentions. Fortunately, the interpretive power of observers and the essence of any work of art extend beyond the intentions of its creator and are not limited by the partiality of texts such as this.

George Merianos

Georgios Merianos

By employing ash, charcoal, and the technique of fumage, George Merianos addresses a pressing issue that has unfortunately become a recurring feature of our once carefree summers. Through the remnants of combustion, the specter of fire looms large in Merianos' paintings, even when the summer months have passed. The artist seems to suggest that the transience of memory can be even more dangerous than the flames themselves. Thus, he engages in a process that extends beyond mere art production, serving as a documentation of a crime to which the viewer is compelled to bear witness, regardless of their distance from an actual wildfire. This documentation is not limited to the depiction itself but is also embedded within the very act of creation. The technique of painting through controlled burning of paper evokes the uncontrollable nature of real fires, while the fragile medium upon which the images are imprinted alludes to the delicate balance of our environment. Furthermore, the artist creates images through scratching and removal of material, a process analogous to reforestation where dead vegetation is cleared to prepare the ground for new life. In Merianos' monochromatic works, we witness ecological death unfolding before our eyes, like a sequence from a silent horror film. The luxury of forgetting has long since passed. The artist has erected a monument to the fallen flora. Despite the lack of monumental scale in these works, the desire to honor the voiceless victims is abundantly clear."

Sophia Xenelli

Art Historian - Museologist

Ιn this series of works, George Merianos constructs a narrative of the state of conflagration through a nearly semiotic approach. Through a ritualistic process, utilizing fire itself as a means of production, as well as ash and charcoal, he eliminates the distance between the viewer and the actual event, creating the conditions for an immediate and personal engagement with the content in a thoughtful manner. While the aesthetic dimension is not absent, his works serve as a stimulus for a moral gaze, and their meaning is inscribed not only in the individual but also in the collective memory of a society that tends to fully appropriate the destructive aspects of wildfires.

Christina Papaioakeim

Archaeologist - Museologist