Vlassis Caniaris

Vlassis Caniaris
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Born	1928 Athens
Died	2011
Nationality	Greek
Alma mater	University of Athens
Occupation	Painter

Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011) was a prominent Greek painter. He is considered one of the leading artists of Greek modernism, as it emerged from the 1960s onwards, with a strong international presence. His work falls within the framework of the so-called "generation of diaspora," which, starting from the 1950s, permanently or for extended periods operated in European art centers such as Rome, Paris, and later Berlin.

Life

Path to painting (1928-1955)

Vlassis Caniaris was born in Athens in 1928. Initially, he studied at the Medical School of the University of Athens. In 1950, he abandoned his medical studies to pursue the visual arts. After taking preparatory classes at Panos Sarafianos' studio, he enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), where he studied under Umberto Argyros, Yiannis Moralis, and Yannis Pappas.

During this period, his exposure to the new trends in Europe and America was limited as the teachings of the 1930s generation still prevailed. However, flipping through books and catalogs at Kauffmann's bookstore substituted for the lack of information and brought the artist into contact with contemporary art movements. Expanding his artistic pursuits, Caniaris participated in the 4th Panhellenic Exhibition (1952) at Zappeion Megaron, alongside renowned artists of the era such as Nikos Kessanlis, Christos Caras, and Yannis Gaïtis.

Simultaneously with his studies, the young painter worked closely with Tsarouchis in stage design, creating his own stage designs and costumes for small theatrical performances. In 1953, he and Tsarouchis undertook the construction of the sets for the film "Stella" by M. Kakogiannis. For the needs of the film, Caniaris studied and visually documented neoclassical houses in Plaka during the post-war period when a significant number of buildings in Athens were demolished during a reckless reconstruction. Together with Tsarouchis, they meticulously studied and photographed neoclassical buildings, streets, and squares before their destruction. They then compiled an archive that documented the architectural history of the city during the period 1953-1955. This experience was reflected in his small-scale works depicting Athens houses, which in the following years would gain a clearer critical content.

In 1953, he married Maria Lina.

Rome (1956-1960)

In 1956, Caniaris moved to Rome. After the experience of the "stone years" in Athens, the Italian capital proved to be a true revelation for the artist. In an atmosphere of political freedom and a ferment of artistic trends and ideas, the artist opened himself up to new influences from the international avant-garde, although in reality, he remained independent.

In 1959, his meeting with the painters Nikos Kessanlis, Yannis Gaïtis, Costas Tsoklis, and Dimitris Kontos led to the establishment of the "Sigma Group" (Gruppo Sigma). Italian art critics viewed the work of the "Group" positively, recognising the originality of its artistic creation.

Paris (1961-1967)

In 1961, Caniaris relocated to Paris. During this time, France was experiencing an era of artificial prosperity, trying to recover from the wars in Vietnam and Algeria. It was also facing competition from a growing Germany and New York, which would soon become new artistic centres.

Athens (1967-1969)

In 1967, the Caniaris family returned to Greece during the military coup, a decision connected to the artist's desire to assist in anti-dictatorship activities. In May 1969, he presented an exhibition at the "New Gallery" in Athens, which was a historic event. Despite the political content of the artworks, he attempted to keep a low profile so that the exhibition would not be banned by the dictatorial regime and to avoid discouraging those involved in resistance activities. In August 1969, due to his involvement in the anti-dictatorship organisation Democratic Defense and the stifling censorship regime in the country, he was forced to leave for Paris. In the consciousness of Europeans, Caniaris became more associated with "political art" in the aftermath of the events of May 1968.

Paris (1969-1973)

In 1969, he was forced to leave for Paris once again.

Berlin (1973-1975)

In the spring of 1973, Caniaris settled in West Berlin as a fellow of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), amidst a climate of radical left-wing ideas in the political aftermath of May 1968. He came into contact with Greek artists residing there, such as Constantin Xenakis and Alexis Akrithakis, as well as German and foreign artists, but he remained primarily independent. He dedicated himself to the theme of Immigrants, which had become a social phenomenon with multiple implications in the 1960s and 1970s. Germany, as a host country for economic migrants in the post-war period, offered him the opportunity to closely investigate the dimensions of this phenomenon and to simultaneously expand his exploration of space, artwork within it, and the role of the viewer.

Athens (1975-2011)

In 1975, Caniaris was appointed as a professor in the Department of Painting at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), and the following year, he permanently settled in Greece.

He passed away on March 2, 2011, in Athens.

Work

Early works (1955-1956)

Still bound by his artistic education and experience in Greece, during the early days of his stay in Rome he paints depictions of Athenian houses. These works are characterised by a strong scenographic disposition as well as a tendency to enrich the representational painting with new elements. His interest in urban landscapes and everyday mythology is particularly evident, as is the influence of his informal apprenticeship with Yannis Tsarouchis, which crystallises in his engagement with set design and the design and photographic documentation of the demolition of neoclassical houses in Athens. However, while he initially shares the artistic codes of the so-called "Generation of the 1930s," a shift is already apparent from the illustrative and mythopoetic indexes towards the depiction of a socio-political climate.

By foregrounding the illustrative content, the painter is led to the realisation of a unique form of realism, which, without surpassing the descriptive indexes of the subject, incorporates different forms of narrative, specifically determined by a particular social character.

In a primarily dark colour palette, the relativity and descriptive indicators of the subject convey the entire weighty scene of the post-civil war period with elements that are detailed, such as soldiers, prisons, neoclassical buildings being demolished next to new apartment buildings and factories. The artist's confession is particularly enlightening: "What I painted at the beginning were again houses, the city, prisons, loneliness, the heavy and bewildering Athens of those times that haunted me there."

A particularly characteristic work from this period is Athens (1956), which the artist recognises as a "key work" for his subsequent journey. Within a heavy atmosphere, different episodes from everyday post-civil war life coexist—arrests, blockades, the tearing of proclamations, observers of the action—while in the background, a large cinematic screen dominates with a galloping horseman, a symbol of the invasion of a new, foreign culture. The intense theatricality, emphasis on space, observers from above, and uninvolved spectators-witnesses to what Greece is or becomes are structural elements that will later evolve in Caniaris's work. Simultaneously, the walls on either side of the door where the arrest occurs are recognised by the artist as the iconographic precursors of the series Homage to the Walls of Athens 1941...19 (1959).

Abstract works (1957-1958)

The transition to a certain level of non-representational art is prepared with a series of semi-abstract works from the late 1956, titled "The Depths." These are shaped reinterpretations of underwater depths, and these works constitute an expression of nostalgia for the artist, "colours and images" that, as he notes himself, "reminded him of what he missed in Rome."

In his primarily abstract production over the following two years (1957-58), Caniaris abandons hybrid forms and descriptive elements, moving towards the complete autonomy of the canvas through colour, design lines, and gestural action in series such as Destruction of Marsinelle (1957) and The Garden of My Childhood (1958). Many of these works were presented at his historical solo exhibition at the Zygós Gallery in May 1958, sparking numerous reactions. Critics Tónis Spitéris and Ángelos Prokopiou characterised the exhibition as the first solo presentation of abstract painting in Greece.

Caniaris's abstract works are connected to the dominant abstract tendencies of the time, which he encountered in the Italian capital. Abstraction was directly related to the subjectivity of the artist, "turning the canvas into an arena," according to the characterisation of American critic Harold Rosenberg, who first introduced the term "action painting." What was depicted was no longer an external event but the act of painting itself, unmediated, between the artist's subconscious and the canvas. However, Caniaris, although he embraced the codes of non-objective painting, did not get trapped in a self-reference that overlooked socio-political issues.

Even the most "non-representational" style involves the artist's social reflection, as seen in the works of Destruction of Marcinelle, a series of "now purely abstract works," which he painted "following a terrible disaster in the coal mines of Marcinelle in Belgium, an event in which about 400 Italian miners lost their lives." Caniaris organises a self-referential, dramatic space, attempting to convey "the emotion" that this specific event stirred in him through "colours and shapes."

The process of creating these specific works marks the liberation from the constraints of representational painting. Even though it relies on violent gestural action, it is more of an interpretation of specific events than an emotional outpouring by the artist. With nervous brushstrokes in multiple correlations and gestural interventions on the painting surface—drips, imprints of sponges, cloths, or multiple passes to secure the transparency of color—Caniaris expresses the full drama of the event and the emotion it evoked. The colour, explosive and violent, takes on strongly symbolic dimensions. Additionally, the traces of unconventional tools (cloths, sponges) replacing brushes emphasise the texture of the surfaces.

The series of abstract works titled The Gardens of My Childhood (1958) also has a strong experiential character. Using "the same process and passion," constructing a labyrinthine space from dark graphic grids, the artist conveys "dreamlike images from the years of his early adolescence." During the same period, the immediacy allowed by "gestural" painting and the automation inherited by younger artists from late Surrealism led to the expansion of randomness as an element of the creative process. The utilisation of chance as a supporting surface, during the artist's temporary engagement with the automation of writing and the technique of frottage, led to designs with multiple drips on newspapers from 1957 and 1958 and especially to monotypes on tracing paper.

Walls (1959)

Having already explored since the late 1958 the use of papers for rendering relief surfaces, with the series of the "Walls," Caniaris sees in the incorporation of external aesthetic materials such as plaster, canvas, twine, paper, etc., the realisation of a transition from illusionistic, traditional representational painting to a specific type of art (concrete art) that later developed in various artistic movements. These specific trends, before becoming distinctive features of Italian artists like Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, or the artists of the French New Realism (nouveau réalisme), manifested themselves simultaneously in the artistic quests of the time, as well as in the work of Caniaris.

The morphology of Caniaris' work, in terms of materials and artistic research, epitomises the emerging trend towards the incorporation of these specific external references, which, however, do not derive from the tradition of the plastic arts. As a "dynamic intervention to change the expressive and technical means of traditional artistic history," the integration of external references presents the peculiarity that they retain and convey "the precise specificity of their use and do not simply draw their meaning from ideological patterns" or ideological investments.

Plaster emerges as the most favored among all the various real materials installed on the canvas. Its density and monochromatic nature allow the treatment of the painted surface as a malleable body, receptive to the artist's multiple, successive interventions, such as affixing, eruptions, voids, erasures, and so on. Starting from 1959, the plastered manual interventions with papers and fabrics take the form of walls, i.e., visual bodies structured on linen or canvas onto which plastered and crumpled unconventional materials overlay or extinguish inscriptions, inexpressible words, chromatic organisations, engravings, and eruptions.

Verbal references with a strong use of blue and red colors, "slogans similar to those seen in Athens during the Occupation," suggest a historical construction of the walls. With the resistant inscriptions, Caniaris returns to the experiences of the Occupation, conveying "the image but also the feeling of the walls of occupied Athens." This integration can be seen as a reintroduction of the real and the specificity of the use of external references, emphasising the political character of the work, which, through successive inscriptions and deletions, overlays and revelations, is never completed but only temporary. As the dots in the title "In Honor of the Walls of Athens 1941...19 (1959)" imply, the series consists of works-processes, constantly evolving, which are recorded as experiences and collective memory through the penetration of the past into the present and the extension into the future.

Space in space (1960)

As the title implies, this marks a transition to a new series of works that create a "dialogue" between the artwork and the real space. Through the unique use and assembly of different materials that extend into space, it aims for a critical placement rather than an aesthetic configuration.

In the early 1960s, a climate of social and ideological questioning prevailed. Art sought to transcend the boundaries set by the adherence to the "nature of the medium," such as the dualisms of modernism, the distinctions between "painting" and "non-painting," "high" and "low," and most importantly, between "art" and "life." Artists liberated themselves from the two-dimensional frame of the canvas and its conventions. They either incorporated non-aesthetic materials and used found objects on the painting surface, or completely abandoned the canvas, "opening up" to the space with real objects, installations, and happenings.

Caniaris belonged to the so-called "post-war generation of the Greek diaspora" of artists who, after completing their studies in Athens, sought to broaden their horizons and come into contact with other artistic movements of the era, such as European avant-gardism. In the late 1960s, Caniaris moved to Paris, having already met the French critic Pierre Restany, founder of the New Realists group, which was dominant at the time. The New Realists in France, by developing new perceptions of the real, were shifting the work from the confines of the canvas or the sculpture space to architecture and public spaces, institutional and commercial contexts that were considered public. They opposed the formalism of abstraction and created a new realist aesthetics – a different experience between objects and public spaces within the framework of a reshaped society of spectacle, control, and consumption. Caniaris himself had stated about this period: "Europe of the 1960s discovered comfort. For me, it was more natural, and even an obligation, to propose these faces and these situations, a world that we pretend to ignore or cover with glittering materials. I tried to present them as clearly as I could." However, as much as we can discern similarities between the artist and the New Realists, Caniaris would soon differentiate himself.

Objects (1961-1967)

Abstract art, now well-established, had reached its most creative stage, and its challenge was already being initiated by new artistic tendencies and groups, such as the New Realists (Manifesto 1960). The path of rupture passed through the abolition of the canvas—the most undisputed symbol of the act of painting—and the reconnection of art with a new urban and industrial reality in different directions. The traditional canvas yielded its place to real objects, the everyday, the industrial, even the most humble and insignificant. The most diverse everyday materials—mechanical components, industrial materials, waste, posters, advertisements, even food residues—are aesthetically transformed through various techniques such as "assemblage" (interventions in space), the accumulation and compression of objects, or the tearing of posters. The result was the creation of seemingly random relationships of interaction.

A similar interest in real objects emerged in New York with the "neo-dadaistic" efforts of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Alan Kaprow, as a need to reconnect art with life.

The art critic H. Rosenberg commented characteristically: "The new painting abolished every distinction between art and life." The beginnings of elevating everyday objects to works of art can be found in Cubist collage and the practices of early 20th-century avant-garde, particularly with the new aesthetic perception of "ready-made" objects, such as Marcel Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel" or "Fountain," thereby abolishing the paternity of the work of art. Duchamp introduced a form of art that claimed to be "art" while questioning "what is" art. It raised questions with potential ontological (what is art), epistemological (how do we know it), and institutional (who decides it) implications. Now, the artist chooses something that they call art, while the viewer's eye comes and completes it as a work of art.

So, Caniaris arrived in Paris at a time when the desire to break free from the formalism of abstraction met Duchamp's aesthetics, with the turn to the ready-made object. Perhaps the event that expresses these tendencies most vividly is Arman's "Le Plein" (The Full) - the accumulation of useless objects at the "Iris Clert" gallery in 1960 - as a response to Yves Klein's "Le Vide" (The Void) at the same gallery in 1958.

In Paris, the artist came into contact with the New Realists (with significant representatives including Arman, Cesar, Christo, Spoerri, Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and others), which led him to increasingly use real objects. Plaster, iron rods, wire mesh, belts, sacks, wires, newspapers, and used clothing became Caniaris's artistic materials.

The heterogeneous materials are initially assembled into wall-mounted and, from 1962 onwards, three-dimensional compositions within space. Pieces of fabric play the role of color, and newspaper sheets serve as thematic backgrounds in assemblages (collages) that often borrow their titles from newspaper headlines. Representative of the early assemblages is "The Death of Mr. H" (1961), with which he participated in the exhibition of the Nouveaux Réalistes. The newspaper headlines refer to the "mysterious" death of the United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Against the backdrop of the newspaper sheets, a composition of metallic mesh, plaster, tulle, and twisted wire (as a dramatic reminder of the human form) adds another dimension to the inevitable event expressed by the titles. Despite their heterogeneity, the assemblages are not random; their composition and placement in space create relationships that interpret, express, and reveal. This is where Caniaris differs from the New Realists, who, despite their intention to promote a "new perception" of the industrial world through the appropriation of objects themselves, often exhaust themselves in a morphological image and a new sensibility without deeper social content. Kaniaris, on the contrary, appropriates the object not to change or "beautify" it but to give it new meaning and to make his position towards social reality more immediate. For him, the choice of the object was semantic. "The Sponge Cloth" (1961), a plank with a metal hook and an old sponge cloth wrapped around it, inaugurates a new series of explorations: the object becomes a tool for revealing and criticizing what lies beneath the surface of things.

Gradually, the objects take on anthropomorphic dimensions, and from 1962, they develop as three-dimensional constructions in space. The work "Front and Back" (1962) holds a significant place in this evolution and can be considered a symbolic act of removing the painting from the wall. The frame of a painting, wrapped in cloths and strips of fabric, is placed upright in space. In the center of it hangs a pair of blue pants. The garment, as a real object, becomes color and alludes to human presence. The work is confined within a frame, but at the same time, it opens freely into space and interacts with it. The boundaries between painting and sculpture, therefore, become increasingly indistinct.

On the same wavelength, American artist L. Weiner, with his work "Removal Lathing Support Wall" two years later, scratches a piece of wall into the shape of a canvas, challenging the notion of the canvas in his own way. In 1966, E. Hesse creates a space between painting and sculpture with the work "Hang Up," rejecting and simultaneously emptying the conventions of painting.

Caniaris's first complete figure is "The Giant Doll" (1962). It is a monumental form that develops around a wooden skeleton, with pieces of fabric and a network of threads reminiscent of a giant puppet. An enigmatic veiled figure, seemingly drawing its origin from the ancient times, gathers monumentality and vulnerability within the threads and folds, thus suggesting both the grandeur and fragility of human existence. Similarly, in "The Couple" (1962), the amorphous figures, covered with plastered cloths and folds, become a dramatic reference to the facelessness of human relationships, while the tattered coat in "Preservation" (1962) is a parody of the inevitable decay accompanying the promises of prosperity. These figures are characterized by strong theatricality that harks back to the exhibitions of the Dadaists and Surrealists, where mannequins become tools of sarcasm, social criticism, and highlighting the absurdity of human existence. While these forms may appear fragmentary and faceless, they impose their material presence in relation to reality, constituting a unique blend of realism and the absurd.

With the direct use of "ready," used clothing, the fragility of human existence is conveyed even more intensely. Empty clothes, hung or thrown on hangers, wire torsos without heads and limbs, a stained pair of pants worn by a hunched torso, a series of dressed armor made from metal mesh and gauze, a pillow filled with straw, a bodice in netting at the top of a composition of metal boxes, and a nightgown hanging on an improvised hanger - all bear witness to an anonymous everyday life, the universe of human realism through absences, incomplete fragmentary existences, and the marks left by the passing of time.

With his works in Paris, Caniaris is recognised as one of the proponents of arte povera (poor art). His interest in everyday materials, combined with a general disillusionment with the socio-political climate of the time, led him to create a series of smaller objects, such as models made from copper wire fragments, wrapped in wire mesh and intertwined wires on the inside.

Towards a political art (1969-1973)

In 1969, Vlassis Caniaris presented an exhibition in Athens (Nea Gallery) featuring constructions made of plaster and wire mesh. This exhibition became a significant artistic event, both for its anti-dictatorship content and its pioneering art forms. He self-censored the exhibition, thus avoiding censorship interventions and the publication of texts that could provoke. Instead of a catalog, visitors received a plaster tile upon leaving, with a red cloth carnation bearing the artist's name and the exhibition date.

During the second year of the dictatorship, the artist dared to present plastered bodies made of a metal skeleton, plaster plates wrapped in wire meshes, imprints of human limbs, and objects on plastered surfaces. The dominance of plaster alluded to the statement of dictator Papadopoulos: "Greece is weak. We have placed it in plaster. It will remain in plaster until it heals." Although the artist did not directly associate his works with this statement, he wanted to emphasise the atmosphere of oppression and lack of freedom prevailing in the country. The coldness of the material helped him convey the entire dramatic content of the period through a language that was concise, tangible, and symbolic. Fragments of amputated limbs on plaster surfaces, plastic toy soldiers (Monument to the Unknown Soldier, 1969), a composition of eight wire mesh-wrapped bodies bound together with wire mesh on a wall painted like a blue sky (Witnesses, 1969), a plastered body wrapped in gray jacket and hands severed in a martyr's pose (Interrogation, 1969), all spoke openly about political violence and oppression – about a ruthless fragmentation of human existence. Often, a pair of shoes or a single shoe left next to the traces of the missing person served as the only material evidence of a vanished individual.

Caniaris's art was not limited to denunciation. Within the deadly plaster, red carnations sprouted everywhere as symbols of resistance, hope, and freedom. Caniaris spoke of an "engaged" art, one that responded to the requirements of specific historical circumstances, with a clear purpose and a direct relationship with the conditions that gave rise to it. It was an art in continuous formal exploration that transcended the constraints imposed by political mobilisation and spoke a language that was clear and comprehensible. This freedom brought the artist face to face with both the traditional Left and the trends of Western avant-garde. For the former, his work belonged to Western formalist movements, while for the latter, his themes were claimed by leftist ideas. Nevertheless, the originality of his forms was not an end in itself; it constituted the field of expression for Caniaris, regardless of the dictates of the two directions, and it could be mobilized whenever social conditions demanded it.

Environments

Immigrants (1973-1975)

Engagement with the issue of immigrants began in 1971, with small independent works characterised by a melancholic mood. In Berlin, the artist continued in the same direction, employing a more systematic approach that allowed him to connect these works into larger units within the space. His aim was to present the lives of immigrants, their daily struggles, dreams, possibilities, and future prospects, avoiding a narrow political or national perspective. He studied the issue of immigrants through a social anthropological lens, conducting direct empirical observations (interviewing them, visiting their homes) and processing statistical data on the countries of origin and host countries in collaboration with labor unions and economists. The issue of migration was also personal, as the artist himself was an expatriate.

The exhibition "Gastarbeiter- Fremdarbeitter" (Guest Workers - Foreign Workers) was presented at the State Museum "Gallery of the 20th Century" in Berlin in 1975. The artist's approach was considered politically inadequate and insufficient for the highly politicised German youth as well as for the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the Society of Visual Arts, which sought a more militant treatment of the subject. However, artistically, the presentation had many innovative elements that made it a comprehensive effort in "environment creation." The term "environment" was initially used by the American artist Allan Kaprow in 1958 to describe large three-dimensional works that incorporated everyday objects and allowed the viewer to enter the work and participate in its completion. In his text titled "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" (1958), Kaprow presented "environments" as an evolution of Pollock's action painting and the American assemblages (interventions in space) of the late 1950s, connecting them to his philosophy of integrating art and life.

Caniaris took advantage of the large dimensions of the space and created a closed central hall that served as the nucleus of the whole, from which recorded sounds and noises of daily life were heard. Around the central ghetto-like core, fourteen individual sets developed, resembling theatrical tableaux vivants, presenting fragmented images of the lives of immigrants. Sometimes solitary and sometimes in small groups, faceless and often headless figures made of wire frames wore the same clothes as immigrants, played with their improvised children's games, and inhabited humble rooms filled with basic household items and objects. Within this daily life, references to milestones and trains, scattered boxes and luggage, recorded with relentless realism the conditions of migration, departure from one place, arrival in another, and the subsequent precarious settlement, permanently haunted by the fear of impermanence. In the work titled Hopscotch, one of the most expressive sets, male figures stood with their luggage on a kind of platform, conveying a pervasive sense of uncertainty and waiting—common but simultaneously unique for each figure—as evident from their individualized movements and postures. On the floor, the game of "Hopscotch" was painted with words like "Disorientation," "Housing Situation," "Employment Contract," and "Foreigners' Police," recording the mandatory steps in the host country. At the same time, the disarming documentation of the problems did not negate the right to dream and imagination, and realism was often accompanied by a tender, poetic, and sometimes surreal dimension. In "The Big Swing" (1973), the figure acquires wings on its shoulders.

The artist seeks hope within the very anxiety of survival; childhood games made from useless materials become symbols of prospects, akin to the carnations of the past. This search for prospects within daily life mostly imparts a humanistic disposition to Caniaris' work. In a period when the demand for reconnecting art with life is quite relevant, the "environments" allow him to express his social concerns with greater immediacy—not only in terms of form but also thematically—making the aesthetic process essentially a political one. The interrelated work-space gives Kaniaris' "environments" an "open" form, allowing the content to be presented more as a possibility than as a final result.

Furthermore, the possibility for the viewer to move within the work and shape their path in a "theatricalised" space with clear social references creates an aesthetic experience akin to everyday life. The "theatricality" that critic M. Fried condemned in 1967 as inherent to minimalism, which violated the "purity" of modernist means, now becomes a reality and blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, scenography and theatre, life and art.

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