Achilleas Christidis – Painting Landscape

Imagine a landscape painted with scripts and signatures, reminiscent of street artists’ tags – a rocky landscape rendered in black, white, and shades of brown. The earth dominates the scene, with a sliver of sky above – nominative, indifferent almost. Yet, without this thin strip of light, composed of white, a hint of blue, and scattered brown markings, the landscape would not exist. Though incomplete, the stained, soiled sky completes the landscape, composing a cryptic Landscape. Upon closer inspection of the earth’s surface, hidden faces, illegible words, indecipherable phrases emerge. It’s a landscape constructed of words, a linguistic landscape. You can read it in multiple ways: with your eyes, closed or open, or with your fingers. To truly perceive it, you must touch it, feel the thick layers of textured paint. Reading this landscape is a sensory experience, physical and yet unfeasible. It is a textual image that appeals to the senses – sight, touch, even smell – without needing mental mediation or memory. Despite its personal nature, reflected in the handwritten script or signature, this landscape doesn’t have to remind you of anything. It is what it is, not pretending to be something else or mimicking nature.
  Achilleas Christidis’s landscapes remain untitled, their origins and background stories unknown. We cannot easily identify with them, and yet they resonate emotionally, without needing our identification. Our only reference point is the date they bear, anchoring them to a before and after, connecting them to previous and future landscapes, and to our own sense of time. Each of Christidis’s landscapes is a moment – a frame, a snapshot, a link in a continuous chain. One landscape complements the others, not to exist or evoke emotion, but to contribute to a larger narrative, a collective Landscape. This is what makes a retrospective exhibition, featuring selections from Christidis’s Landscape from the past twenty years (2004–2024), so significant: it offers viewers the chance to wander through his landscapes, moving from one to another, with the exhibition space itself transforming into a kind of landscape.
  If a landscapist is a painter of landscapes, Christidis has certainly earned this title. However, he goes beyond a mere depiction of landscape – he explores its representation itself, the very concept of landscape painting. His brushstrokes form amorphous masses at the centre of his works, as if the landscape is expelling itself. At times, they create a curtain that obscures the background. Sometimes calm, other times wild and frenzied, these strokes play their own game within the canvas’s boundaries, creating independent spaces or altering the character of sky and earth. A sky may become an abstract composition, a second painting within the painting. His expressionistic brushstrokes intertwine, generating three-dimensional spaces that seem to confine the human figure – though human figures are conspicuously absent. Occasionally, the very genre of landscape painting is subverted, morphing into something else entirely – a floral still life that conceals the landscape within. Painted in the foreground, these flowers seem almost to assault the viewer, to invade their private space.
  In other works, Christidis’s equivocal brushwork orchestrates a peculiar dance of uncontrolled – or perhaps meticulously controlled – movement in all directions, spreading thick layers of impasto paint that merge the sea and sky, obscuring parts of the landscape from view. Clearly, the pursuit of a beautiful, perfect image is not a priority for this artist – and yet, his landscapes possess inner harmony, likely derived from their basis in lived experience. Still, one wouldn’t say Christidis is documenting a specific location, or his own presence there. His depiction of Greece is unpredictable, magical, offering surprising, unique palettes. Yet the landscape of Greece, while present, isn’t immediately recognisable in the way it is with other Greek artists. However, beneath the surface, there’s a quiet, subterranean dialogue with Nikolaos Lytras, whom Christidis refers to as the ‘chief,’ particularly regarding Lytras’s earthy, natural landscapes of Tinos from the 1920s.
  Christidis’s landscapes are not always panoramic. He often focuses on details, such as a single flower, calling to mind another artist with whom he has been having an ongoing conversation, Thanos Tsingos. In other works, simple structures – a hut, a lighthouse – provide enough balance to sustain the identity of the landscape. Frequently, Christidis paints views that aren’t conventionally striking. Yet, he seems to delight in rendering these seemingly indifferent aspects of nature. It’s a challenge he embraces – capturing the subtle shifts in the brown-green of earth and trees, the monolithic form of a dry hill, or the dense black shadow of a cypress. For Christidis, nothing in nature is indifferent or impersonal. Everything holds value as long as you take the time to notice, to let the hidden beauty, the magic, unfold.

Christoforos Marinos

Curator of exhibitions and events OPANDA

Translated by Dimitris Saltabassis