IN CHRONIS Botsoglou’s art, the body functions as a metaphor for the human condition and skin becomes the canvas on which the journey from life to death is recorded - and, at his harshest, Botsoglou’s gaze captures the fear of deterioration and the feelings of vulnerability and loneliness that weigh more with age. 

 

Five decades on, the former dean of the Athens Fine Arts School, acknowledged as one of the most important representatives of postwar Greek art, has conducted a thorough study of the human figure. 

 

“Every artist has just one thing to say. Even if he is Phidias, even if he is Homer, and even if he is Dante,” Botsoglou has said. His words define the 69-year-old’s retrospective - his largest to date - at the Athens Conservatory. Put on by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, this latest show brings under one roof more than 170 works representing each period of the artist’s entire oeuvre. 

Recurrent in Botsoglou’s work are solitary Giacometti-like figures pictured against vacant monochromatic backgrounds that range from bright-yellow to pitch-black.

 

 

Among the paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and engravings on display are some of the artist’s landmark series, including Oil Mills (1978-1986), almost metaphysical in their exquisite quietness, as well as the painfully detailed Journal Pages (1980-1990) portraits of his mother, and his Homer-inspired multi-panel painting installation Nekyia (1993-2000). 

 

“Anthropocentric and realistic,” according to NMCA director Anna Kafetsi, Botsoglou’s almost obsessive depiction of the human body goes beyond the strictly representational. 

 

His penetrating scan-like gaze is more concerned about what lies under the skin. And his exhaustive portraits each time take a step closer towards deciphering the eternal questions of existence.

The weightless, almost otherworldly air of Botsoglou’s figures is combined with a tactile quality, according to Tina Pandi, the show’s curator. 

 

“Botsoglou puts forward an embodied painting with a tactile character, which is connected with a sensorial depiction of the human condition, pointing out that, for him, ‘painting is the art of the sensation of touch through vision, sensorially and not thematically’.” 

 

 

In The Fall, one of the show’s most dramatic works, the portrait of a naked man standing is coupled with a plaster reflection lying on the floor. For an artist who has only recently started working with landscape, Botsoglou’s densely structured drawings and watercolours of his ageing mother in the Journal Pages series are a painful recollection of every little trace of the face’s landscape and its function as a mirror of the soul’s inner workings. 

 

Most intimate and haunting at the same time, Botsoglou’s Nekyia portrait series was named after Book XI of the Odyssey which describes Ulysses’ descent into Hades and the invocation of the dead. An ode to memory, Botsoglou’s magnum opus, which took seven years to complete, is a consummation of the artist’s personal mythology inspired by his environment. 

 

Firm in his recording of the adventures of the human body - be it that of his immediate family or quite often his own self - Botsoglou is equally steadfast in his willingness to comment on society.

Along with Yannis Valavanidis, Cleopatra Dinga, Kyriakos Katzourakis and Yiannis Psychopedis, Botsoglou formed the group of New Greek Realist painters in the late ’60s and ’70s. 

 

 

His sociopolitical perspective around that time is best displayed in his focus on the anonymous crowd of commuters and workers, through the depiction of building sites, accidents on the job and pensioners. Similarly political is Botsoglou’s 1972 Frieze series and its fragmentary imagery of collective visions: soccer, sex, advertising and consumerism. 

 

A series of imaginary portraits pays tribute to five artists - Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgos Bouzianis and Yiannoulis Halepas - all of whom influenced Botsoglou through their own studies of the body and its inner mechanisms.