A Place Called Space

Wednesday, 3 August 2022

From garden to garden

In the summer months, Saturdays are reserved for Athens. The beach is too crowded so it seems a good opportunity to catch up on exhibitions and to have lunch at one of our favourite restaurants. Last Saturday we wanted to go to the Byzantine Museum. We started from Syntagma where the National Garden is. This used to be the garden of the royal palace, but after the royals were chucked out of Greece, the palace became the Houses of Parliament and the royal garden, a city park. Athens desperately lacks parks and green spaces - the National Garden is in fact, the only park I can think of in the centre.

We walked through the gates, the tall palm trees facing us

Ken went to check the sun dial - it's apparently slow by half an hour

these palm tree trunks are magnificent. This path was not on our way however, so we went straight ahead, rather than turning right

lots of shady areas for people to sit - particularly needed last Saturday as the temperatures had reached 40oC

Paths on our left and right

and some colour too

We soon realised that extensive development work was going on for a large part of the garden so we took one of the few available paths

another contemplation area

a gazebo

with a fountain and sculpture

and lots of fish

I could see a cave on the right of this path so we went to explore

No idea what it is

Lots of shade here

past the Botanical Museum

running water

and we had arrived at the cafe of the park

This always seems such a shady oasis to me - I always want to stop and sit here, but I never have, as we're always on our way to somewhere

the cafe even has its own grotto.

The cafe is by one of the park exits leading to Herodou Attikou Street, where the presidential residence is

A two minute walk and we reached

an archaeological site - Plato's Academy, I think

Then on to Vassilisis Sofias Avenue, the Cycladic Museum across the road from us

and we had reached the second garden of this trip, the garden of the Byzantine Museum.

Bougainvillea by the entrance

and the museum building on our left

The park meanders through the garden

In the distance we could see the Lycabettus Hill, the little church perched on top

Lots of eucalyptus trees in the garden

and some antiquities.

I always think that this sculpture is wasted in its glass box, it's so difficult to see it properly.

It's a circular path so eventually we ended up in front of

the museum building

past this sculpture by Konstantina Bolieraki

Up the steps

past the restaurant

and we found ourselves at the front of the building. We saw the exhibition which was excellent and then it was time for lunch.

We decided against sitting in the restaurant area as they had these huge air-conditioners which were extremely noisy

and moved on to the cafe area where you can still sample the lunch menu. We ate in splendid isolation

the garden in front of us. We could see lots of greenish birds that flew around, favouring the nearby fig tree whose foliage was identical to that of their feathers so that once they landed on its branches, you could not distinguish them. We decided that they must be parakeets - why there were so many in this garden we could not fathom given that we have not seen them anywhere else in Athens.

We left the museum after our lunch

admired this gorgeous tree

and then it was time to go home.

Monday, 1 August 2022

Splendour - Gerard Fromanger at the Centro Cultural de Belem

A post from our trip to Lisbon in May.

Splendour - Gerard Fromager

at the Centro Cultural de Belem.

A painter who also employed collage, sculpture, photography, cinema and lithography, Fromanger was associated with the French artistic movement of the 1960s and 1970s called Nouvelle Figuration, somewhat like Pop Art. He was also associated with photorealism.

The Nouvelle Figuration movement (sometimes called Figuration Narrative or Representation Narrative) is considered to have been a reaction against abstract art, with a more political slant than American pop art. Fromanger has been described as a social critic who takes a political position without neglecting the poetic dimension.

One of the pioneers of the return to figuration in the late 1950s and early 1960s France, he became a leading figure of figuration narrative. Depicting urban environments and anonymous passers-by, his painting technique was close to photography. As a founding member of the Atelier Populaire at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he also produced various collective and political serigraphy works during the May 1968 events.

One of the works that he submitted to his peers at Atelier Populaire was the serigraphy of his Album The Red 1968, depicting the French flag with the red stripe dripping across the rest of the lower portion of the flag suggesting the loss of blood. Although the work was rejected, he created a series of twenty other serigraphs to accompany this first work. Developing the thematic of the flag, Fromanger realised nine other serigraphs of capitalist and communist nations' flags, the red elements of which are dripping, along with serigraphs of scenes of urban protests in which the figures are transformed in red silhouettes. From these anonymous urban scenes, he reused the red silhouettes throughout his future work. When presented for the first time to the public, this series of silkscreens was quickly hailed as a milestone for the political and subversive stance it embodies.

Album The Red established not only Fromanger's artistic career, but also reinforced the divergence between the figuration narrative artists, whose approach to art was distinctly politicised, and the American pop artists' approach.

The exhibition was organised in a number of series that characterise the artist's work: twenty six in all, including more than sixty major paintings. I have reproduced only a fraction of the works exhibited.

I have not translated the titles of the paintings, and I would like to apologise for not putting on the accents on some of the letters.

Le siege de Lacedemone par Pyrrhus repousse par les habitants eux-memes de tout sex et de tout age, 1989, (oil on canvas)

Le Soleil Inonde ma Toile, 1966, (acrylic on cut-out wood)

Mon Tableau S'Egoutte, 1966, (acrylic on cut-out wood)

Alberto Giacometti, Portrait of a Woman, 1965, (oil on canvas)

For Fromanger, seeing a Giacometti painting was like entering a temple. He often confided that as a young man Giacometti's painting, with its silvery shimmer, fuelled his desire to paint. Throughout his life as an artist, Fromanger remained attached to the mysterious intensity of Giacometti's work, and would come to know the artist as a friend.