Page 39 - The Venice Biennale 2001 issue of World of Art Magazine

49. Biennale di venezia rePUBLic OF cyPrUS

to new forms and impressions. Portraiture transcendental portrait, an impression of the sensuous and melancholy head of the
abandons profiles and full fronts, turning the created energies of an incomprehensible Cavafian youth flow the breaths of many
now toward a 3/4 impression, in an attempt Nature) stems partly from the imitation and a people, as the portrait departs from
to give a sense of movement, a sort rhythm of Greek painting, and partly from its individual entrenchment and drifts into
of counterbalancing attitude toward the Platonic metaphysics. a monumentalisation of man himself. It
portrait, a contrapposto. These conquests of The earlier intensity encountered in becomes a painting of the Persona. A
Greek painting made a dashing comeback Karayan’s portraiture, subsides here in painting which makes a sacred icon
in the High Renaissance, mainly in the the mature work presented in the Venice out of beauty. Beauty? Not the ideal,
exemplary portraits of Leonardo (Mona Biennale. Now serenity dominates, a unapproachable and indefinable beauty, but
Lisa /La Gioconda) and Raphael (Balthazar sweetness, an inner tranquillity which filters the earthly, demoniac, incarnated beauty
Castiglione), finding their morphological the tableau and radiates outwards. The bringing the Fall, promising pleasures; a
culmination in Titian (Ariosto). monumental and archaic, the quasi hieratic beauty, a perishable beauty - thus wonderful,
quality of his work, is balanced by this moving, demonic and saintly at the same
esoteric light of byzantine, transcendental time.
origin, romantic in its approach, but mostly It is to be wondered at how this clear-cut
by an inner melancholy which emanates realist reaches such spirituality, such radiant
from latent conflict between youthful beauty inwardness, without ever abandoning his
and the perishability of time, a contest manners and fixations. Yet, let us remember
between the mortal and the everlasting, that Karayan has experienced the modern
between dust and ether. sensitivities of the European metropolis and
Karayan’s means of expression are purely that, at the same time, he has long been
painterly; his is the art of the Old Masters. versed in the poetry of the great Alexandrine
Colossal faces, two meters high, oil on Cavafis (having indeed illustrated Cavafian
canvas, worked with such fine brushes, as art publications), who also lived there, at
in the small portable icons of egg tempera, the southern edge of the mediterranean
but without this fine brushwork being basin and set his seal on the 20th century
obvious, without revealing its labour. On with his transverse palimpsests of an
the contrary, the densely painted surface, erotic contemplation on the flesh, in
smooth and without pastings, is carved, the Imagination and in Logos. Karayan
scraped, tortured by the artist, not in order dares through painting to achieve Cavafis’s
to give the patina of age, but in order captivating venture; he attempts to find 49. Biennale Di veneziA
to acquire depth, sentimental perspective. again “things half-glimpsed / faces or lines;
Thus, the portrait of a contemporary youth certain indistinct memories / of unfulfilled
(Karayan always paints from life) becomes love affairs”3, he attempts to salvage in
a palimpsest of feelings and breaths; in painting “what was really precious - his
form”4. How successful this
attempt is, is testified by
the viewer’s immersion in the
paintings.

Thus we discover in Karayan, a very nOTeS
smooth mingling of iconographic traditions, 1. On the views of the Florentines on
a transfigured eclectic engagement, maniera greca, see nicos Hadjinicolaou’s
expressed in a contemporary manner. Let us extensive introduction to Fernado
say, that we witness a materialised, painted marias, el Greco and the art of his
version of the classic perception of the time. commentary on vazari’s Lives
(of distinguished italian architects,
Socratic circle on vitality in a work of art: painters and sculptors). cretan University
“to entertain men through sight, making the Publications, Heraklion 2001, pp. 22-26,
vital visible”2. The vitality of a painting has containing references to other sources
nothing to do with it being true to life, the and studies. 2. Xenophon’s memorabilia
painting itself has to be alive, beyond any iii 10,6. Quoted by christos Karouzos in
“characteristics of Greek art”, ancient
comparison to the natural model. art, Hermes, athens 1981, p.12. 3.
At the same time, we discern an “i’ve brought to art”, from c. P. cavafis
assimilated use of the tradition of collected Poems by edmund Keely and
transcendental painting, the spirituality of Philip Sherrard, chatto and Windus,
Christian iconography, in which from the London, 1963, p.89. 4. “Tomb of evrion”,
Greek human Face we come to the Greek from c. P. cavafis collected Poems by
edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard, chatto
Christian man-god, the Word Incarnate and Windus, London, 1963, p.37.
(Logos). Two seemingly opposite traditions,
which nonetheless mingle and co-exist,
as the Byzantine icon (in essence a

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