At the age of 70, artist Nikos Kypraios has the voice of an enthusiastic youngster, full of love for his fellow man.
And that may not be what you expected from an artist, delved into his own world; and continuously inspired by catastrophes that have struck today’s man, angry – through his art – for the injustices in the world we live in.
But at the heart of it is an artist with a constant intention to improve the human condition, as critic Robert C. Morgan describes him.
Himself a Greek of the diaspora, the mention of Nikos Kypraios’ name brings back many memories amongst the members of the Melbourne Greek community.
Like the one of Nikos doing the portraits of his Greek Australian friends.
Around 45 portraits have been finished, all of the artist’s real life friends that have never been exhibited before. After being warned of their existence by a newspaper colleague, I notice them on Kypraios’ website, carefully planned and regularly updated. A website that this modest artist has never seen himself.
Son of the Greek island of Samos and its rocks, in 1972 Nikos migrated to Melbourne. In the early ’90s, he returned to Greece with an aim to spend 13 months in a monastery researching Byzantine hagiography, but he has never looked back.
As we speak, his exhibition is set to open in Singapore; throughout the interview he reminds me of his love for the Hellenism of Melbourne and the years he spent in Australia, the people he met.
It was this feeling of isolation of a migrant, of uprooting and estrangement from one’s homeland and migration to another that has inspired Kypraios through all his work.
His first series exhibited at Melbourne’s La Trobe University – that he remembers with nostalgia – were portraits of immigrants.
“Coming from Athens, I found myself in Melbourne out of nowhere; I was noticing people who would rush early in the morning to enter the factories, where they worked so hard. I was so surprised and impressed that I imprinted this experience in the series of portraits.
“This absurdity is exactly what happens to the man who has been uprooted from his place and replanted elsewhere. This transplanting is not easy. It was in Melbourne that I discovered Greece,” Mr Kypraios says characteristically.
“I’m still an immigrant; I still have this psychology. It’s nostalgia – not for the homeland but for our lost innocence. It is the context within which I always move. I am not painting from some kind of a decorative mood, I paint because I love the man.
“My heart is in Australia and my legs are here, in Greece.”
After spending 13 months in a monastery in Greece, and interested to portray the threads of Hellenic race and what it went through in 1,500 years, Nikos Kypraios made Greece his permanent residence again. But when we speak, almost a quarter of a century after he left, he says he can’t take his mind away from Australia and its Greek community.
“At that time, we were all the same, we had a very close relationship between us. We had created an Art Centre, To Kentro Tehnis, in my atelier. We played music, we did exhibitions, there was a stunning and sophisticated love between us. Whatever we did, it wasn’t to earn money. We had enthusiasm. Those things were done with a clean heart.
“Australia has really helped me to perceive that the man should be universal. I do not feel that I am a person of a particular piece of land, I belong to the whole world. This is what Melbourne taught me – to feel a citizen of the world,” Mr Kypraios says.
The world of deafening silence
An artist who enjoys international recognition for his work, Nikos Kypraios works in series, with every series having a different subject matter.
There was a saints’ series, fish and fruit series, landscape and flowers series. He has been inspired by the Aegean landscape and deeply impressed by Byzantine art and iconography. He has been described as a ‘contemporary icon painter’, a man who understands the human reality of today and transcribes it through his artwork.
But there is a common denominator for all of Kypraios’ series – what appears like still-life painting is always used to convey a much deeper message, that of human emotions, and to pose metaphysical questions about one’s existence. Kypraios tackles universal content and captures it on his canvas.
“In Burning Trees, I saw the desperation of people, of refugees, of those persecuted, those who were lost in the Mediterranean, that’s what I was concerned about,” the artist explains.
On Friday, 25 April, Nikos Kypraios’ newest exhibition The Ecstatic Breath of Freedom will open in Singapore. The exhibition marks the master artist’s second solo exhibition in Singapore and in Asia, after his series of icons was presented there in 2012.
In The Ecstatic Breath of Freedom, the artist uses voiceless fish to symbolise humanity whose voice has been muzzled by popular media and impersonal markets.
“The reason why I chose the fish as a symbol, as the central theme of this series, is because it has no voice, just as the people of today have a deafened voice.
“With fish, I speak about a glaring silence – silence because you see humans fragmented, with all the trouble and the agony they go through, suffering in this world. They have a deafened voice; they are muzzled and slaughtered by the mass media, through an impersonal market, multinational corporations. This is precisely the message that my fish carry, under the general title ‘Deafening silence of the fish’, as it originally translates from Greek.”
With fish, Kypraios also urges viewers to be mindful of their surroundings as well as the way the environment has been treated.
“I try through my paintings to have some kind of a dialogue with my age, the era I live in, about global problems – not only that struck Greek people, but for the agony of the mankind. This is essentially the doctrine which I have worked on for my whole life,” the artist tells Neos Kosmos.
With Singapore audiences impressed and having showed great interest in Kypraios’ previous exhibitions, and in such an art as the school of icon painting is, the artist hopes his new artwork will be as loved and as embraced in the island state of South-East Asia.
“The man to whom I refer to with my art is tired, embittered. With painting, I aim to write an essay. And I write it in my own way, the only one I know.”
Captured in a fertile fusion of two cultures and three homelands, Nikos Kypraios now lives and works between Athens and Samos.
“My other wound is Samos. I love the island, its history, its rocks, its fields … Well, with people there are always problems,” he says with a laugh.
“But the moment the man manages to domesticate a monster inside him – because we all have within us the good and the bad – some very nice things come out.”
Work of the Greek Australian master artist Nikos Kypraios can today be found in the collections of the Marc Chagall Museum, the National Gallery of Athens, the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Modern Art in Minsk, and many other institutions.
The exhibition The Ecstatic Breath of Freedom, by Nikos Kypraios, opens on 25 April at the Arts House Gallery, 1 Old Parliament Lane, Singapore 179429. Part proceeds from sale of artworks will go towards the International Young Artists Exchange Fund. To attend, RSVP by 21 April to amnah@toph.com.sg. The exhibition runs till Tuesday 6 May.