I often wonder what might account for the enduring interest that all kinds of artists show toward the person and work of the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy—an interest that sometimes leads them to depict his life and, at other times, to comment on specific poems of his through their own art forms. One possible answer might be the international recognition his poetry gained in the second half of the 20th century, though that alone does not adequately explain a phenomenon of such scope. After all, there are many other Greek and foreign poets and writers whose value is widely acknowledged, yet they do not command that same preferential attention from visual artists, musicians, theater directors, or filmmakers that is so regularly directed toward Cavafy. I have the impression that Cavafy’s own poetry, which features a wide array of figures from Art and Letters (painters, sculptors, engravers, poets, orators, musicians, actors, grammarians, philosophers, and sophists), provides the impetus for these renewed artistic renderings in media other than poetry. It is a reciprocal relationship—there is, one might say, a kind of collegial artistic solidarity at work.
I have followed Andreas Georgiadis’s painting for years with great interest. After a remarkable trajectory so far, characterized by the breadth of his chosen themes, he is now turning toward the Alexandrian poet. I would venture to say that Georgiadis arrived at Cavafy (as happened with other thematically concentric bodies of his work) through literature—without overlooking his personal travels to Alexandria. Seferis once said that to understand Cavafy’s poetry, you must visit the poet’s city. In some earlier group exhibitions, Georgiadis explored Dionysios Solomos, Alexandros Papadiamantis, and the literary Generation of the ’30s. I am referring especially to his previous solo shows titled In Search of Lost Time (2011) and The Alexandria Quartet (2014). In the first, his works conversed with excerpts from classic French writers such as Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and others, while in the second, through the refracted gaze of Lawrence Durrell, the painter illustrated streets, houses, and landscapes of Alexandria. A similar atmosphere was rekindled in his solo exhibition devoted to another capital of the Greater Hellenism (Constantinople, 2016).
As far as I know, Georgiadis had previously engaged with Cavafy—indirectly or directly—in a few older exhibitions, such as his solo show Crossing the Nile (2013) and in a 2013 group exhibition in Kavala and Cairo, held in the framework of the “Cavafy Festival.” This prehistory proves that he was “ready long ago” not only to approach the Alexandrian poet and his work, but also to convey the surrounding atmosphere of Alexandria, Cairo, and Egypt, which so often underlies Cavafy’s poetry. That is because Georgiadis’s perspective is not limited to the poet himself or to superficial elements that could easily signal to the viewer a direct link to Cavafy. Skillfully and methodically, he peels back the layers of poems, landscapes, and people, revealing the deeper joints and allusions of Cavafy’s expression.
Most of the thirty works that comprise this current exhibition mainly comment on poems from the “canon,” along with some of the so-called “Hidden” poems and a few Alexandrian landscapes. They all share a unified color palette, aiming to convey, in a consistent way, the cohesion that runs through Cavafy’s entire body of poetry. The predominant colors in Georgiadis’s palette create and enhance a mood of internal geography, sometimes with unexpected deviations, but always with a coherent perspective. Each poem is rendered in a distinct manner that suits it, without compromising or abandoning its unique atmospheric quality. For instance, in the piece inspired by the poem “Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old,” the conventional horizontal image of two reclining figures is inverted; here, it is presented as a photograph taken from above, capturing the nearly touching heads of these horizontal companions. Several erotic poems are depicted solely through a single portrait—an approach akin to what a reader might imagine while reading these poems. Moreover, Cavafy himself provides certain traits of his characters’ appearance or facial features, which makes the painter’s work easier and, at the same time, expands his creative freedom. This applies to the poems “In the Street,” “Come Back,” “Iasis’ Tomb,” “Far Off,” “Days of 1903,” “Days of 1908,” “The Mirror in the Entrance,” “When They Are Aroused,” and “He Asked About the Quality.” These are portraits of high aesthetic merit, fulfilling the criteria Giannis Kefallinos set out in his classic essay, “The Portrait.” In his words, a portrait must “always appear as a biography. It is not just an impression of a single moment; it’s the story of an entire life. … It must show us its subject’s era, origins, field, and actions—in other words, it must reveal the individual’s character, laid bare.” Georgiadis’s Cavafy portraits possess exactly those virtues.
I must make special mention of his portrait of Cavafy himself, which departs from the typical depictions drawn from the poet’s known photographs—sources on which every earlier portrait has relied, even those by artists who knew him personally and attempted to capture his likeness. In all such instances, the painter was bound by an existing photographic model, leaving little room for the kind of quirky, creative reinterpretation that can diverge from what is visible. Georgiadis set aside all (in any case, quite few) known photographs of Cavafy and depicted him leaning slightly, resting on a table, in what could be called a “gentle tilt toward the cosmos.”
The nearly uniform color palette that I mentioned earlier—corresponding to the unity of Cavafy’s poetry—becomes apparent in many of the displayed works. Particularly striking examples are the paintings commenting on the poems “At Nine O’Clock,” “An Old Man,” “The City,” “Down by the House,” “Days of 1909, ’10 and ’11,” “The Afternoon Sun,” and “Walls.” If we consider Cavafy’s various inhibitions and the constraints imposed upon him by his family and social environment, we instantly see the concept of enclosure—the feeling of being shut in—laid bare in many of his poems. Those “high walls” built around him stand for an entrapment vividly rendered in the paintings mentioned above.
This exhibition does not merely illustrate Cavafy’s verses. It proposes an interpretive approach that conveys the inner rhythm running through many of the Alexandrian poet’s erotic poems, as well as the atmosphere of his native city—the one he himself wished to capture and which travelers even today can still sense. In offering his own personal, captivating take—born of his ongoing dialogue with C.P. Cavafy—Andreas Georgiadis forges a uniquely powerful link in the chain of visual artists who have, to date, commented on the poet.
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