In reviewing the works of Sotiris Sorogas' career in art of more than 40 years, one notices at once certain persistent themes in his subject-matter. There is a group of specific motifs which he negotiates as a painter in a different way on each occasion, but to which he returns after certain intervals, with variations upon them, sometimes developing and combining them with others, in such a way as to create series of works - such as stones, statues, misshapen pieces of wood, rusted objects, old engines, horses with nooses at their throats, marble from old quarries, 'photographs' faded and 'burnt' at the edges, portraits, the 'holes' of wells, and clearings, all shipwrecks of a life spent and impaired by erosion.

It is in no way an accident that, because of the reprise and reworking in terms of subject-matter of many of the above motifs, no one has so far attempted any form of division into periods of the stages through which the artist has passed. This is clearly due to the fact that divisions into periods of this type are usually based principally on subject-matter units and morphology; this is not possible with the works of Sotiris Sorogas, since he employs the subject only as a means of expression and often as description as a pretext, while he handles his morphology mainly in relation to the statements which it is simultaneously making and its associative references.

Ι shall attempt here a first classification of the phases which can be distinguished in his works, in order to help the viewer to recognise - behind and beyond the subjects - the artistic and aesthetic issues which they largely reveal and the reflections of the painter on them.

The first period extends from 1958 to 1974, a time when the lonely 'poppies' with their carmine colour were shown (1958 - 72) among the naked stones, as a kind of resistance to time, to decay, to abandonment, and to convention. The piles of'stones' made their appearance in 1970, and at the same period the 'Triptych' of the seated man who is gradually disappearing, leaving in his place the jacket or an "empty shirt for a Helen", in the words of Seferis. Also reminiscent of Seferis is the ancient statue with blood below its pedestal, recalling the poet's line "and with our brothers blood live on the soil". At the same time,'ancient reliefs' as parables and, at the end of this period, his drawings of horses made their appearance - all works which gave expression allegorically to the stifling and oppressive atmosphere which the country experienced under the dictatorship and the resistance of a socially-aware artist who took part substantively and intellectually in the reactions of the times.

This was followed by the period 1974 - 1985, with the 'Horses' which turn their heads backwards and have nooses tied round their necks, hinting at a restraint upon spontaneity imposed from without (1974 - 80). These give rise to an indirect correlation with Picasso's Guernica horses.¹ Together with the horses, stones with red, blue or white cloths, as a contrast with 'living' material in the composition, make their appearance, as do the 'threads' (1975) and the 'red circles' (1975 - 76), which serve to mark the bounds between the past and the present, the known and the unexplored. These are followed by the black 'holes' and the 'wells' (1980), and then by the 'burnt photographs' and the 'portraits' of the early twentieth century, inspired by the actual documents of that period.

The third period includes the years 1985 to 1992, in which the 'scarecrows' (such as the 'scarecrow of Agoriani') and compositions showing stones, wood, and rust feature.

In the period 1992 to 1997, Sorogas painted rusted objects, eroded metals, objects which are useless and thrown away, with the imprint of the human gesture and of their former function evident upon them; these have accumulated upon them fingerprints of human toil and old memories, which appear in the visual field as non identified enigmas and unanswered questions.

The next period covers the years 1997 to 2003, in which his works show rust, chains, a mooring on the pebbles near the sea, and rusted and monster-like machinery in the quarries of Penteli, while at the same time the artist reverts to marble, to stones, and to 'burnt photographs'.

Sotiris Sorogas paints with acrylic paints and charcoal. His works are spare, with clearly-distinguished forms from which a multiplicity of colours is lacking. Many have drawn attention to their monochrome nature.² He focuses basically on the balance between form and void as that shapes space; the dialectic rendering of the fluctuations of chiaroscuro is related to this.

Normally his forms are presented on gleaming white paint which becomes blindingly suggestive as it recalls the metaphysical gold background of Byzantine icons.³ Through this light, a spiritual space is suggested which refers us to the collective unconscious, from which the images of a world which has been demolished and fragmented are projected on to a white screen, with a radical realism which neither describes nor narrates but creates what one could call a cold incision of the image which calls forth introverted tensions, together with their simultaneous emotional discharge.⁴ This midday light of Seferis, this light at its zenith, between life and death, gain and loss, flight and pilaster-like endurance, retains to some degree the recognisability of the image, but undermines its identity of subject.What is depicted is shown as effulgences of a truth, the meanings given to which are revised and re- defined in the light of the approach of each beholder and of his experiences, associations, recall of memory, and ways of thinking.

The image is, through an ascetic style,⁵ presented in a state of dematerialisation or momentary capture, as a photograph could show it, and in this way it dictates its temporary nature, which is imperilled by the light, as the form dwindles, leaving a kind of imprint in its place.

While the realistic readings in the works of Sotiris Sorogas lend support to verisimilitude, nevertheless the way in which the unanswered enigmas are presented stimulates by reflex action the mechanism of the memory, which corresponds to the mechanism and the function of the style and appearance of the depiction, which condenses traces of a life which no longer exists or traces of a life which is drawn up from the depths of the collective unconsciousness as a deafening silence, leaving its present-day meanings suspended between the broken stones, the ruins, the skeletons, the bottomless darkness to which the gloom of the wells leads, or the black holes which open up like gaping depths. A world which is both familiar and distant is made manifest in his works, which lay bare their depth, which is transfused on to the surface by osmosis, in a palpable manner. Past and present are depersonalised, without losing their character, creating a fabric of interweaving' and mutual containment between imprints and after-senses of the visible, between allegories and non-conventional post-symbolisms, between yesterday's experiences and their meta-poetic conversions, without a subcutaneous mystery and the suggestiveness of a ritual atmosphere related to the very gesture of depiction and the meaning-imparting function of the act of painting as such being lost.

In whatever Sotiris  Sorogas paints there is a bereftness, an abandonment and  a  desolation.  The  light  penetrates the image,  x-raying and transubstantiating its materiality, tending to sublimate it or to burn it up like the sword of the archangel.⁶ Light is the equivalent of space and time. It transforms in a borderline way the familiar into the unfamiliar and the well- know and exceptionable into the strange, drawing out and at the same time robbing them of their nostalgia.This is not, in this specific case, a romantic nostalgia, but a journey of return which is stimulated as light and by a process of intervention acts upon the collective memory, through which the moral dimension of the act of creation, which shapes and determines its aesthetic parameter, is brought out. By virtue of that parameter, the image narrates its autobiography. Its inner tensions which prompt the beholder to introspection are related to existential Angst, which encloses within it a metaphysical dimension which is, nevertheless, not one of revelation from above, but is constituted and emerges through the very features of actual life lived. This is a life which is dismantled, reviewed, and reconstituted. The metaphysical dimension is suggested by the enclosed abstractive elisions of the image, which is shown magnified and hovering in space- time, as a vessel for reversing echoes, as it transforms the world of its natural features into a world of forms, inscribed in the firmament of archetypes.⁷

The individual, likes his ruins, has been crushed. The forms, depicting and depicted through their lost identity, probe a new beginning which has no relation with transcendence, but with a revision of the awareness, feeling and thought, which links pre-rational situations with reality and its meta-history. The gigantic magnification of the details, with the parallel expulsion of the surroundings which framed them, turns the retina into a magnifying-glass which focuses on the pores of the forms, tracing out the approaches and escape routes of the light, as the image is converted into silence and its discourse into myth, through a subterranean geometry of eliquilibriums and confrontations.⁸

The viewer identifies with the things depicted and the entries registered on his life which are shown, while at the same time he distances himself from the heroic and mournful trophies of a world which is obsolete, but which persists, ghost-like, in re-appearing, in the expectation of a reconstitution and transmutation of a different order - a transmutation which strikes out the fear of death (not death), as the small scale is transformed into macroscopic contemplation and the denudation into the monumental antiquity of a universe which is presented as an imperishable writing of the light at the zenith of the heavens.

The spaces of a presence from other times have given place to the 'speaking' absence which recalls it, having left behind, exposed, the symbols of a Promythean fall, an eviction of our first parents. This eviction suggests the vanity of the illusory picture brought to light by representation, and Sotiris Sorogas uses it only to elide it, confirming in this way the existence which is tested in its Symplegades.

The vicissitudes of the image which is formed in each instance as a topological map of light retains the encoded nature of what meets the eye, at the same time determining its anti-naturalism, which is transformed into a vehicle of thought. Whatever this image represents as a given material, it does not put off its eremitism, creating in the last analysis a polyptych of letters, syllables and fragments of an inner wall-painting. By means of this wall-painting, the artist records and lines up (as Homer does in his 'catalogue of ships') the post-mortem gleanings of 'episodes' which seek their new nomenclature through the indissoluble interweaving of the bonds of art and life.

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NOTES

1. These works set up, apart from anything else, a dialogue between two eras through their artistic contexts. In all probability this an early form of postmodernism, as expressed by Sorogas at that time. Later, the horses were replaced by the charioteer who, with his eyes closed, leads his chariot into the darkness (or into the 'sinister' side of the light on the farther side), in order to suggest the ambiguity of the subject.

2. See Marina Lambraki-Plaka: 'Memory and art in the painting of Sotiris Sorogas' in the catalogue of the artists exhibition 'Notes from the Quarry of Penteli', pp. 7 - 8, MR Goulandris Foundation - Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, November 2001.

3. See an article on this by the painter Orestis Kanellis in the periodical Dimiourghies, issue of February 1972, Athens, and the related references in the article of Athena Schina'Tracing of a far-shining hinterland', I Lexi periodical, 24, May - June 1983.

4. The 'Three texts on the painting of Sorogas' by Giuliano Serafni (corresponding to the'Three Hidden Poems' of George Seferis), published in Greek and Italian in booklet form by Smilii, Athens 1991, pp. 15 - 29, is deeply thought-out and concise.

5. See the introductory text of Haris Kambouridis to the artist's exhibition catalogue, publ. S.M. Mihalarias Art, 2-26/11/97, when 'Skouries' was presented at the gallery of that name.

6. These tendencies - of the burning, but not the complete consumption and transformation of the image - are also to be seen (but in a different way) in the'burnt photographs', which are shown through an encirclement of flame in which their total incineration is precluded, in a way indirectly reminiscent of the Old Testament bush which 'burned but was not consumed'.

7. See Stephanos Rozanis,'Prologue' in the booklet containing the'Three Texts' of Giuliano Serafi ni, op. cit., note 4.

8. See the interview of Sotiris Sorogas with Athena Schina, published in the periodical Speira, issue 8 - 9, 1987, pp. 25 - 43.