Nikos Kessanlis Greek, 1930-2004

Venice, XXXXIII Biennale di Venezia, 1988, no. 202

Radical and innovative, Nikos Kessanlis belongs to that generation of Greek artists who were the first to attempt a dynamic change in art, an opening up to the contemporary international scene. A direct participant in European artistic developments since the '50s, Kessanlis, through his work, has renewed the discourse of the Greek visual arts.

Yannis Spyropoulos put Kessanlis on his artistic course by helping him to obtain a four-year apprenticeship (1944-8). In 1948 Kessanlis enrolled in the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Yannis Moralis, while also working with Nikos Nikolaou. Having graduated cum laude in 1955 he went to Italy on a scholarship from the Italian Institute in Athens to attend the School of Art Conservation in Rome, where he stayed until 1959. His acquaintance with Thanos Tsingos convinced him he should settle in Paris in 1960, where he met Pierre Restany, a prominent figure in the French art world, and the Nouveaux Realistes, whose ideas were to influence his work for a number of years. The very active and creative period which followed placed him firmly in the avant-garde of innovative art in Europe.

In his first works (1946-57), Kessanlis experimented with a variety of techniques (oils, encaustic on wood and marble, mural painting) and styles.  After joining the artistic circles of Rome, he began to approach the international abstract trends of the 1950s. This is the climate reflected in his series of Flowers and Birds of 1956-8 (see lots 54-56 and 94-95), the subjects of which are stylised, barely recognisable vegetal and animal figures. The colours have a relief texture and their handling bears witness to the artist's early interest in the importance of gesture in painting. That interest was to come to the fore particularly towards the end of the 1950s, when Kessanlis moved towards Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, and Tachisme. The common denominator in all these trends is the artist's total liberation from any compositional subject or rule. The paintings are their creator's field of action, a record of his movements. Kessanlis's first truly formless work, Paesaggio grigio, was presented at the XXIX Biennale in Venice (1958); while his Compositions and Images series placed him within the same general climate of artistic inquiry as the abstract trends in Europe and America.

His move to Paris in 1960 brought him into contact with the Nouveaux Realistes, a group of artists whose aim was to renew the language of visual art by introducing the contemporary iconography of the mass media and artefacts of industrial culture into art. Their activities included happenings, collages, and assemblages. Kessanlis's works from the series Gestures and Walls are based on the use of a medley of disparate worn-out materials and rubbish, newspapers, paper, and so forth, put together in distinctive collages, either monochrome and austere or overloaded with successive layers of materials and paint. They experiment with the relationship between the object and the painted surface and between the material and the gesture, and were the preliminary to his abandoning painting and moving on to three-dimensional works that approached the rationale of ready-mades, such as those he presented in Nouvelles aventures de l'objet (Paris, 1961). Wire mesh and crumpled paper were released into the space and left to their own devices. From then until 1963, Kessanlis's technique consisted in the use of 'worthless materials' (barbed wire, cloth, paper, wood, plaster, worn-out metal objects).