Becoming an iconographer6/24/2023 ![]() He is the curator of The Mount Athos Art Archives, which functions under the auspices of Simonos Petra Monastery and deals with contemporary artistic production related to the Holy Mountain. Alongside painting Kampanis also engages in art historical academic research, which has led him to book editing and curating exhibitions. A major recurring theme of his work has been Mount Athos, which in 2010 became the focus of a major retrospective in the Byzantine Museum, in Athens. The subject matter of his work is broad, encompassing landscape, still life, figuration, and also the exploration of materials and the painting process itself. In 1984 he participated in the 15th Biennale of Alexandria. He has exhibited widely in both one man and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. ![]() He is mainly a painter but also works with printmaking, book illustration and church murals. Kampanis was born in Athens in 1955 and studied painting in London where he lived until 1980. Markos Kampanis, The Last Supper Table, 2005. In short, for Kampanis the inherent principles of painting (harmony, rhythm, color, value, line and form, etc.) can serve as a bridge across historical and cultural realms. For him there is no conflict or contradiction, but a complementary dialogue between parallel histories of painting, Byzantine and Modern, that serves to fertilize and fuel his creative oeuvre. At times traces of these pictorial elements might appear organically in his iconography, or conversely, his uncontrived command of iconographic principles might occasionally appear in his non-liturgical work. He has thoroughly integrated within himself a whole gamut of 20 th-century painting techniques and styles: realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionist, “primitivism”, abstraction, pop, etc. Thus in Kampanis we simultaneously find the rudiments of Modern painting and the iconographic Tradition converging seamlessly. That is, his “innovation,” is not to be confused with “modernist” or anti-traditional subversion, but is rather to be understood as a penetrating and creative interpretation, of the timeless pictorial principles that tie together the best icon painting throughout the centuries. Hence, as the curators of his major retrospective “Painting in Athos 1990-2008” have put it, “…Markos Kampanis is one of the innovators of our ecclesiastical painting based firmly on the tradition, he doesn’t imitate it but he creates a personal painting style.” There is no question that Kampanis is an iconographer who treats Tradition not so much as a thing of the past, but rather as an ever-renewing living reality, ever present, palpable and accessible today, as it was for the ancient masters. But what makes him even more interesting and relevant for us is the fact that he is not just a contemporary painter but also an iconographer of considerable creative potency. Markos Kampanis comes to mind as a refreshing example of an artist that had done just that. To pull off such a feat of artistic independence might seem untenable, almost a recipe for career suicide, but I would rather call it a heroic sacrifice. In this scenario the brave ones go against the grain and define their own terms independently, without pandering to the establishment. So it is understandable how an artist, seeking a niche within the cutthroat competitive world of contemporary art, would feel the pressure or compelled to conform to the demands of the main stream gallery market and its dogmatic, postmodern critical discourse. Ironically, although the avant-garde might have shattered the stifling shackles of the Academy, it has now itself become another form of restrictive academy, forming an inextricable ideological component of our galleries and museum institutions. We often forget that our contemporary art, although the offspring of the 20th century revolutionary avant-garde, has its own set of artistic dogmas, its form of “orthodoxy”, so to speak. A Matter of ‘Ethos’: An Interview with the Painter Markos Kampanis
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