Page 38 - The Venice Biennale 2001 issue of World of Art Magazine

49. Biennale di venezia rePUBLic OF cyPrUS
rePUBLic OF cyPrUS
andreas karayan / PerSOnae

Cyprus participated in the The participation of Cyprus is Culture. The deputy
biennale of venice for the first organised and sponsored by the commissioner is Mrs Stavroulla
time in 1968. Then, after an Cultural Services of the Ministry Andreou who is based in italy.
interval of time, it resumed its of education and Culture. in This year the Cyprus exhibition
presence at the biennale in 1986. the 49th venice biennale Cyprus will be held at Spazio TheTiS
As Cyprus does not possess its is represented by the artist Castello, 2737/f, 30122 venezia.
49. Biennale Di veneziA
own pavilion, its artists have Andreas Karayan. The Tel +39 041 2406111
been housed at different display commissioner is the Art historian Fax +39 041 5210292
areas such as Arsenale, italian Dr. eleni S. nikita, Senior Cultural e-mail: karayanart@hotmail.com
Pavilion, Palazzo Lolin, Tese Officer at the Cultural Services,
Cinquecentesche dell´ Arsenale. Ministry of education and

for his work as such.
Karayan, like Tsarouhis (who had, for that
matter, praised his work), concentrates on
the male form, a par excellence subject of
Mediterranean painting since antiquity. In his
early works, Karayan also exemplified some
fauvist and naturalistic elements.
Karayan’s painting rests on such solid
foundations. Overtly and covertly. Overtly,
he knowingly borrows the Byzantine way of
adding light to the dark ensemble of the
face, breaking away from the tradition of
“tangible” Florentine painting which scorned
the “barbaric”, almost expressionistic, use of
light of the “maniera byzantina”1. Overtly
also in the use of a background of gold as
reference to the gold field (“kampos”) of the
Byzantine icon. Covertly, he bestows upon
the faces he paints the spirituality and inner
light of the Byzantine figures, the aura of a
by nicos Xydakis art critic, member of AiCA the East, the late classical period (4th century
transcendental art, abstract by today’s terms.
The form and structure of Karayan’s faces
refer to the history of the Greek kingdoms of
B.C.) and Hellenistic portraiture particularly
the portraits of Fayyum. At the apex of Greek
portraiture, great artists (from Parassius to
Apelles) made a decisive shift from the
symbol to the Face, from the hieroglyphic
to the imitative image. This new paradigm
(in Thomas Kuhn’s use of the word) leads

“What was really precious - his form”
Some remarks on the portraiture by Andreas Karayan at the 49th venice biennale

Artist Andreas Karayan, born in the Eastern Mediterranean and educated in Western
Europe, draws upon both traditions in order to give artistic expression to the one and
only theme which concerns him: the human figure. At the height of non-figurative art,
indeed at a time of non object art, a time signifying the end of the history of art, he
insisted on “old-fashioned” painting, embracing the human form with a knowledge of
tradition, with tenderness, elan, violence. In the 70’s and 80’s, art critics in Greece,
discerned in Karayan a worthy successor to Yannis Tsarouhis, the well known Greek
artist (1910-1989), who had been a painter-fetish and a key figure in the understanding of
the post-war Greek art scene, more because of his attitude and interpretations rather than

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