INTERVIEW WITH LILLIAN PSYCHE
The Greek painter Kostas Tsoklis chose the island of Art, Tinos, to “house” his works and continue to create in his own unique way. We met him at his Museum in Kampos Tinos, in the midst of preparations for his new exhibition, where he spoke to us about unknown aspects of his life and the works inspired by the pandemic.
How did you choose Tinos to build your museum and exhibit your work?
I’d say it was an accident. And the accident is that I have an old love story that I’ll tell you quickly. When I was a student, a man myself, I loved a girl. This girl, well, this girl was in the preliminary – and I was a freshman in the school and when she took the exam to get into the labs, she didn’t pass. Her parents went and found Moralis, my teacher, but he was also a kid and he didn’t understand many things and they asked him, “Why didn’t the girl pass?” and he replied “but how could she pass, since she’s been hanging around with Choklis all day!” The parents, therefore, thought it right to send her as a nun to Tinos. I really loved her – kids now, but great intensity. But as I was poor, I was always obsessed with poetry and I had a dozen or fifteen books of poetry. So summer came and I didn’t know what to do and I took my little books and sold them in the bookstores on Asclepius Street. I got enough money so that I could buy a ticket from Athens to Piraeus, and from Piraeus to Tinos and back. There was a lousy bus back then, there were no good roads so the journey was hectic, and I went and knocked on the door of the monastery and a little window opened and a nun’s head came out and said “what do you want?”. I told her which young lady I was looking for and I said I was a relative of hers – I didn’t know what to say! So she said, “they have gone on an excursion” and abruptly the window closed and I was left penniless, I didn’t know what to do, I only had the return ticket! Well, for this girl we never found out what happened in the end. The earth opened up and swallowed her. So that was a trauma and an antipathy I had towards this island. That’s why for many years I didn’t even want to hear about Tinos. Then all the things in life happened and I found myself one day with a Greek friend who lived in Belgium, and he bought a property here in Tinos. He asked me to go and find him and give him advice on how to make the most of his property. And I decided and came to Tinos. I was terribly charmed. It was an amazing island. And I started to come 2-3 years together, I advised him, we even made a play together. One day, passing by Kumaros – where we have the property now, I saw a “For Sale” sign one day. It was in Kumaros that the nuns had gone on an excursion at that time, that was where their resort was… And I said that since it was for sale, I would buy it – I had the opportunity at that time. So I bought the property and built this house. And one day Natasha Pazaitis, the wife of Kostas Karamanlis, came – she asked to see me. She showed great love to do something for the island, since I was here too. Panagiotis Krontiras was mayor at the time. And this miracle happened: the state gave me money to turn the former primary school into a museum, which was incredible. Unbelievable things. That’s how it started. From there, everything I could put in, I put in, to finish it right. And now right now I think of it as a “cenotaph” – I like to call it that, where my thoughts, some of my works, all of my archives are in there. Every person has to belong somewhere. An artist friend of mine once told me this simple thing and I have never forgotten it: ‘what can I do, my Costas, when I am in Kypseli I am not in Pagrati!’ such a simple thing, and yet I considered it very important. So I had to be somewhere. Well, let me be in Tinos!
What stimuli have defined your art until today?
When I was in Rome in the first years, I felt that we were completely provincial. We were taught an art between Cézanne and Pompeii and I find myself in a Rome then, after the war, that is “foaming” with art. The world – you would say – didn’t exist, except for that. Or so it seemed to us. So you find out that that was the time of Abstraction, and what we had learned was not only useless, but aggravating. So, we are a group of friends from the school, who made the Gruppo Sigma. And, so, we got caught up in the game of finding an art form that had never been done before, that was original. So, then, because I had a terrible, really inhuman agony of learning, I left and went to Paris, where I had a very, very difficult time, but with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of love from my friends and close people, and from my wife at the time, who helped me a lot to get back on my feet, and for eight years I was in “obscurity”, so to speak. And at one point, she became aware of my work by an American gallery and became interested. In three months, I was an international vendetta! My works were being bought without even being seen! When I did the exhibitions, they sold everything on the wall, the whole exhibition. Of course, the prices back then were low. And I created a reality. Until the things of life came again to get involved in the business of art. Iolas became very interested in me too, and I made one of the greatest mistakes of my life and my ethics, to leave the American gallery, even though they were the ones who helped me out of obscurity, and go with Iola. Iolas then had galleries in New York, Geneva, Paris, Paris, Rome, Milan… so it was a little bit – how can I put it, so a little bit more spectacular.
“I wanted to depict “nights of glory”.
And I sat down and made these works, all black – melancholic.”
Would you like to tell us a few words about your new work that will be exhibited in your Museum?
You see, I would say that Chrysanthi Koutsouraki, the director of the Museum, is partly responsible, because she likes to travel around Tinos and admire the landscapes. And a couple of times, even though I’ve been around Tinos ten times -before she did it, we went and she showed me places and I pretended I was seeing everything for the first time! But he always managed to get something new past me. And as I closed this year with the coronavirus, I had made plans. I wanted to depict “nights of glory”. And I sat down and made these works, all black and melancholic. It was a bad year, for all of us who were booked.
If the education of the Greeks was a blank canvas, and you were to put elements on it, how would you begin to shape it in terms of the subject of Art?
Look I should become a white mind too, so that we can start together – have a similar path. A man laden with 1002 things cannot touch and stain a clean space that is still waiting[…]I find that we are waiting. I am not waiting for anything. Because, you see, there are no wigs folks. There are analogies. A hope, to have left a scratch, that when you wipe the dust off it and people ask you what it is, you say “Choklis, a Greek artist, did that”. I don’t know if I’m allowed to hope for more at this point.
Now that the
lockdown
, and we are in a recovery phase, how do you personally see the future as an artist?
I always tried to belong to all generations, I didn’t like it when people said “you belong to the ’60s, the ’70s”, now I saw that my time has passed. Although I worked 35 years ago with modern media (see live painting), I now saw that I already belonged to the past.
So, how will you move?
I’m defending yesterday. Let’s hope for the scratch!
Educated what does it mean?
A man who knows yesterday.
What does yesterday have to teach today?
Look, let’s take the word “education”. Educated what does it mean? A man who knows yesterday. This is education, what we know from yesterday. What happens in the present is information. everything that has to do with the education of man, education in the sense of form, of formation and formation, is the past. So the past has everything to teach us. In fact, I would say, not to teach, but to be everything. Inside each of you, each of you, including me, we bring in yesterday. And we hope, or – even the most cunning among us – foresee, the future.
