Alexis Avlamis, ‘Nostos’

By Emily Pillinger

Alexis Avlamis, ‘Nostos’, 2019, acrylic and coloured pencil on canvas, 60x60 cm

Alexis Avlamis is a Greek artist whose paintings investigate the complexities of memory and identity. Taking an improvisatory and intuitive approach to his creations, Alexis’ work blurs the boundaries of the material and imagined worlds. The painting showcased here is called ‘Nostos’, and offers a vision of Odysseus’ return home. In the painting we find an exploration of what Penelope means to Odysseus, superimposed on a more elemental depiction of the sea, the sky, and the land.

Alexis lives and works on the island of Kefalonia, one of the forested Ionian islands to the west of mainland Greece. From the eastern coast of Kefalonia Odysseus’ island of Ithaka is easily visible, its green mountains rising up from the sea on a clear day as if they were simply a continuation of the Kefalonian coastline. The suitors in the Odyssey are described as hailing not only from Ithaka but also from nearby islands: ‘Doulichion, Same, and wooded Zakynthos’ (Od. 1.246). There is no modern Ionian island called Doulichion or Same, but Sami (the modern Greek pronunciation) is an old town on the east coast of Kefalonia, so some argue that the suitors from Homer’s ‘Same’ travelled over from Kefalonia.

The mountains of Ithaka, as seen from Kefalonia.

In ‘Nostos’ Alexis offers a dreamlike, surrealist, portrayal of home from Odysseus’ perspective, though the actual viewpoint is unstable. It is a view of Ithaka’s coast from a distance, but the foreground suggests that the viewer is also on land, or at least on a beach. Is the viewer looking at Ithaka, or from it?

Just above the horizon, where the deep sea meets the sky, we spy Penelope’s loom. This symbol of domesticity and feminine trickery appears to have floated free of the women’s quarters in Odysseus’ palace. It bears a cloth whose top is intricately patterned while the lower part is unfinished, or unravelled. Looking more closely, one can see that two very fine threads lead away from the loom: one tethers it to the land, the other to the sea. These threads are taut, as if the loom is being flown like a kite, or suspended like a helium balloon. In its small space of calm above the horizon, the loom appears to be hovering at the mouth of a portal into another world.

The rest of the sky is turbulent and threatening. Alexis suggests that the spikily geometric shapes and the hallucinatory shadows describe the obstacles Odysseus must face on his journey homewards. Yet if this painting represents the storms that Odysseus must weather, so it also represents Odysseus’ reason for persevering. Appearing through the clouds at the mouth of a tunnel or pipe (a wormhole in the universe, even?) is a tiny monochrome portrait of a woman in half profile, with the stillness of a nineteenth century photograph or a cameo brooch. This circular image of Penelope is Odysseus’ emotional compass; it is the star by which, and to which, he must navigate.

This collage of face, place, object, and emotion, is brought together by a colour palette drawn from the moments when nature can appear at her most strikingly synthetic. Over the muted colours of the land pours a light that appears to emanate from Penelope herself. Her static image emits a sunny glow that suffuses the sky, transforming the purple and grey of the stormy air into the green, turquoise, orange and pink associated with rainbows, sunrises, or the aurora borealis - natural phenomena that feel mythic, no matter the scientific explanation.

For more of Alexis’ work, check out his website: https://alexisavlamis.com.