Will there be wild orgies? “I’ll organise it for you later,” visual artist Micheal Zavros promises.

Raise the Roof – Dionysus Redux curated by Zavros at Lina at Brisbane’s Southbank, will be “transformed into a modern hedonistic Mykonos and festival of Dionysus”.

“We have six rooftop parties as final events marking the end of the Brisbane Festival and mine has grown very big,” Zarvos adds.

Zarvos has brought together Legs on the Wall, a local Greek opera singe, Pana Kalatzis, professional naked models (everyone will need to keep their clothes on) , and Alex Dimitriades as DJ.

“I wanted something decadent like Greek ancient festivals which pushed the boundaries and were transgressive and very liberal,” he says.

Dionysian festivals broke down the architecture of power for a liminal period. Women celebrated alongside with men, and slaves became masters. Sex was welcome.

“I love liberation, we say we live in progressive times, yet we’ve become conservative.”

Zavros’ work is a timely antidote to the frumpy censoriousness which has occupied our culture and media.

Beauty has a home in his practice. The visual artist has a body of work created over the last fifteen years consisting of beautiful objects, men, and women, of powerful majestic horses, and even elegant memento mori sculptures. His work is loaded with irony aimed at the beautiful vacuousness of modern elites.

His images are weighed by saturated colour – it’s the Renaissance meets Vogue.

Zavros plays with eroticism and mystique, and the promise of decadence. Images and sculptures carry a hint of what may go on behind closed doors with a touch of narcissistic malevolence. A welcome danger.

“I like looking at beautiful things and I create things I enjoy looking at, but there is a pushback in contemporary art to that which is beautiful but insists on being critical.

“It is easy to pillory beauty,” he says.

“So much about contemporary society is about the narcissism emerging out of social media, so we critique those things heavily, and beauty has become the victim, it’s under fire.”

Zavros has always been an aesthete. “Ever since I was a little kid, I loved beautiful things, and the obsession with youth and beauty is as old as the Greeks, it is not shameful.”

The new shame, and prudishness he says partly arise from “mass consumerism and the many issues that plague contemporary society.”

“We now curtail freedoms – it’s funny how seeking to be diverse or seeking equality has actually curtailed a degree of freedom and bred a new kind of censorship”

Anglosphere and European critiques of the Greek ideal of beauty and eros have born a starchy aversion to Hellenic aesthetics.

Greeks never sought to be an ideal they were very aware of the human condition – idealised beauty was not attainable by humans. Adonis, Athena, Achilles were the ideals – and they were gods or demigods. There is no idealised version of Socrates in ancient Greek sculpture. We see him as he was, bald and squat.

“I make my own ancient Greek connections, and they are central to my practise,” Zavros says.

As he became more established, he reflected more his Greek heritage. “I’m drawn to certain classical ideals in ancient Greek history, and mythology.”

Assumptions by Anglo European elites in the past created an idealised fantasy of Greece, and spurred European notions of white supremacy, when in fact, ancient Greeks had no notion of race and colour.

Ancient Athens, or Corinth are so distant to us now, all we can do is imagine. New evidence has come up which suggests that Greeks were much more Asian and their statues more like those in ancient Memphis or Varanasi.

Zavros’ mother is Australian, and his father a Cypriot who arrived in Australia when he was five. He was aware of racism as a second generation Greek migrant kid brought up on the Gold Coast.

“I was a “wog” surrounded by blonde haired, blue eyed surfy types, and they were the ideals that I had.

“I was brown growing up and then at some point those in the diversity industry started to deem us privileged, and white.”

Now, Michael Zervas wants to defiantly party. His panegyric homage to Dionysus, the god of ribald excess and wine is a necessary stand against safety and boredom.

Lina’s rooftop will be a hedonistic safe zone, a conduit between ancient Greece and modern Mykonos. Eros, madness, wine, and theatre. Orgies? Maybe not.

Dionysus Redux September 23 www.brisbanefestival.com.au/whats-on/2022/raise-the-roof-dionysus-reduxwww.brisbanefestival.com.au/whats-on/2022/raise-the-roof-dionysus-redux