Agonizing and cruel faces, almost blackmailingly attractive, seem to star in episodes of the “Twilight Zone” which is not foreign to us, it is not unfamiliar. It is already an imago mundi, a mirror of reality. Lavdas’ characters do not appeal to the intellect; they literally grab you, they speak to you to the core, because they are stripped bare either discreetly or in a more acute way. They appear before our eyes in a borderline state, they are revealed just one step before the “fatal” happens. Redemptive or not, the end is left to the viewer’s gaze. “Hasta” is the title of the exhibition by the painter, which means “until”, referring with bitter irony to Che Guevara’s famous phrase “Hasta la Victoria siempre” (“until the final victory”). The painter does not define either what victory is or how it will come. Man is defined by the temporal indeterminacy of his behavior – an indeterminacy that knows no end or death.
Lavdas’s attention is focused on the question: how can a world without reason exist? “Humans, as rational beings, have the need to find a reason in order to give meaning to the condition in which we live,” he declares himself in an era when “political correctness undermines, distorts or even ignores any measure arising from humanitarian and spiritual values.” His painting deals with this void, the absence of a point of reference that ruptures our inner world, our existence.
Through a game of associations, with obvious reversals of scale and size, with particular sharpness in the drawing, with clean, flat colors and distortions that reach the grotesque, the painter achieves an evocative atmosphere, combining hagiography and pop art. His work finds direct references to the teachings of Byzantine painting with contemporary and secularized themes. After the unexpected death of Stelios Faitakis, Kostas Lavdas leads a neo-Byzantine modernism in Greece, borrowing from the Freudian workshop and the pop culture of comics.
Byzantine painting is an art with deep roots, which, when transferred to the hand of the modern artist, offers imaginative compositional solutions. “It does not operate in an elitist manner towards the viewer, embarrassing him. On the contrary, it is familiar and direct to him,” believes Lavdas, boldly grafting it onto a style that he defined very early on and has been cultivating and evolving ever since. “This characteristic of it, combined with its timeless flexibility to adopt contemporary elements and to converse creatively with various painting movements, without violating the personal stylistic characteristics of the painter, seems very charming and liberating to me.” Lavdas’s style does not aspire to become a style. It is not the product of a method constructed within intellectual laboratories. It is an attitude of the soul.
In a letter to his niece Sofia Ivanov, Dostoevsky, who is struggling with the difficult conception of the novel “The Idiot”, writes: “The primary idea of the novel consists in presenting a positively beautiful person. Nothing in the world is more difficult, especially today… There is only one positively beautiful person in the world, Christ, in such a way that the appearance of this infinitely beautiful person is a miracle in itself.” The face of Myshkin, the sensitive and kind-hearted prince who bears characteristics of self-denial and holiness, similar to that of Christ, was brought back to our world by Kostas Lavdas. The painter’s Myshkin, however, does not wear Zeffirelli’s powder. The painter’s faces are naked, dirty, unsightly, distorted – but no less divine. Their justification is not the result of beautiful actions. That is why it does not embellish them. The works of Labdas are a series of terrible confessions.
