"Art is not art unless it threatens your very existence."
"Could you repeat that, please, but more slowly?"
— Lawrence Durrell, Clea
Nearly six years ago, in a brief essay titled The Times of Day and Shadow in the Art of Andreas Georgiadis, inspired by the unforgettable Venice of his personal mythology, I described the painter’s inescapable "Waste Land," a watery city of the imagination. Painted from memory and closely resembling the real Venice, it evoked Walter Benjamin's "primeval forest," the enchanted place where "wild" natives and "botanical explorers" of 19th-century Romantic literature wandered. Andreas Georgiadis' dark, deep-blue Venice ultimately became "the still lagoon, the imagined watery site of memory, continually engaged in dialogue with a suspended, menacing sense of inevitability, potentially hosting all impossibilities."
Georgiadis' works, generally emerging from the depths of a drawn subconscious and the instantaneous mood of a vividly perceived image or a captivating literary setting, are interconnected in the emblematic and concise manner that geographical memories of indelible destinations connect. Re-reading Durrell's Quartet with activated attentiveness and visiting its originating matrix, Georgiadis was gripped by a torturous desire to transform the act of reading into visual autonomy: to compose the entire stage of action in the landscape of the mind, to preserve the purity of emotion, and to bridge the gap between reading and painting.
Walking alongside me through the fragmented remains of bygone Alexandria last October, he spoke with familiar enthusiasm about Durrell's mythical city from the Quartet, which converses with Joyce's Ulysses and Stratis Tsirkas' Drifting Cities, intersects with E.M. Forster’s Alexandria, and is haunted by C.P. Cavafy's. For this place of Freudian surprises and Einsteinian theories, with its Western metaphysics, Levantine destiny, and boundless possibilities, which he encountered through meticulous reading, Georgiadis explained that his resistance to decay is primarily channeled into the image of memory, "the most potent tool for preserving emotions, as essential to me as water and food."
Captivated by Alexandria "of five races and five languages," like the characters of the Quartet, who remain bound to the spirit of the place—the genius loci—Georgiadis once again draws the enraptured viewer into the intimate geography of its depths. He paints its still midday light in luminous sepias, walking together with the viewer "along the elegant Rue Fuad and its grimy Arab alleys, pausing on the starlit Corniche and at the Cotton Exchange, frequenting with Darley, Nessim, and Justine at L'Etoile, Café Baudrot, or Hotel Cecil, and the small hashish dens on the sandy outskirts, peering into the whispered dealings of brothels and barber shops, the illuminated interiors of grand mansions and seaside pavilions." Avoiding "the sweet ingredients of nostalgia," yet tenderly lifting the protective veil of the city's dusty memory with precise and vivid design, Georgiadis seems to understand Alexandria as Sam Jordison describes it in his remarkable article The Alexandria Quartet: Mirrors and Telescopes: (3) "This utopian city of Durrell's kaleidoscopic history," Jordison writes, "reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, is, however, according to its author, the only true event in the book. I would urge the reader to follow it through the magnifying mirrors and telescopes that appear repeatedly throughout the plot: from the refracted first appearance of Justine’s deceptive reflection in the three-sided mirrors of a room and the echoes of conspiratorial whispers in Mnemjian’s barbershop, to the relentless telescope through which Nessim spies on Justine’s amorous encounters with the narrator, and the dusty little mirror of memory that preserves Pursewarden’s reminiscence."
If it is true that Justine might have been no more than a mirage, it seems equally true that Nessim’s confession resonates: "Man is merely an extension of the spirit of a place." Andreas Georgiadis has compellingly succeeded in painting the mirages and the spirit of this place. Bidding farewell to an Alexandria he never truly lost, reconstructing its images "miles and years away," he now resides on a small Mediterranean island, like the narrator of the Quartet.
1. E.M. Forster, Alexandria, A History and Guide, first published in 1922.
2. "Rereading: The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell," Jan Morris, The Guardian, published 24/2/2012.
3. "The Alexandria Quartet: Mirrors and Telescopes," Sam Jordison, The Guardian, published 9/3/2012.
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