Vlavianos, passado e presente / Vlavianos, past and present
Paris 1956 -1961
Vlavianos e Paniaras / Vlavianos and Paniaras
Os anos 60: Vlavianos / The sixties: Vlavianos
Vlavianos, escultor / Vlavianos, sculptor
Os anos 70: Depoimento / The seventies: A statement
Entrevista com Vlavianos / Interview with Vlavianos
Os anos 90 / The nineties
Os anos 80 / The eighties
Nicolas Vlavianos
O "essencialismo" de Vlavianos / The "essentialism" of Vlavianos
Atenas, Paris, São Paulo, Nova York / Athens, Paris, Sao Paulo, New York
Um projeto heraclitiano de vida e obra / An Heraclitean life and work project


V l a v i a n o s,   s c u l p t o r                                                 Mário Pedrosa
Rio de Janeiro, 1966

Men who create art, today — because they are men, and never forget that —, are afraid to declare that they are artists. Here is the profound difference

between the artist of yesterday and the artist of today. Nicolas Vlavianos, the Greek, Vlavianos the man, Vlavianos the sculptor is a victim of this contingency. That is to say, a victim of fundamental ambivalence. Born in Athens and although being Greek, outside Athens he is a barbarian. He never lay himself prostrated before the sacred shrine. Greece, however, from Peloponnese to Tessalia is in all its entirety, the nature of a culture. Or the culture of a nature (and with such spontaneous splendour!). Between nature and culture there is no place for a foreigner to set foot. Time, however, has dug out a rift between one thing and the other. And so the ruins have emerged, the same, just like the rosemary and the olive, from Tessalia through the Peloponnese. Nevertheless time cannot continue to produce these ruins because these have gained eternity, placing themselves between nature and culture. As if he were a scavenger, the artist survives like a worm in this rift. Here he is digging the left-overs, the wreckage of his work, objects manufactured by man and discarded. And so here he is, modern and alive, needy and curious, like a street dog, in his task of joining together heteroclitic pieces of things into which destiny, memories and the men’s science continue to impose themselves, ever since the Greece we mentioned here. Vlavianos departed from Greece, with his pack on his back.

He came to Brazil, via Paris, naturally. And he began to join together what he could from his long journey (for an artist, every journey is an odyssey) — pieces of old iron, screws, nails — and he beat them and welded them. From the violence of welding he wanted, visually, to impose an affirmative desire on the absurd scrap that he carried along. This was when I first met him in São Paulo. At the bottom of this desire was an image, or what remained of an image, of a humanist thinking, longitudinally translated into monsters, in the confused compact mass that came from his hands. São Paulo almost made him a man of the world. I mean, it tore him away from his archaic reminiscences, and (if he were a painter I would add here, trying to explain the thought better) his ‘palette’ exalts itself, enriched by the new material-tones, lead, plastic and above all aluminum. Pointing out the pictorial aspects of his sculpture, he abandoned the functions and overlaying of pieces of iron, of packets of nails and squashed screws in a three-dimensional space, and presents us with a text of abstract signs. We are invited to read it and no longer do we embark on it or feel it by touch in the shining panels or the worked metallic surfaces, engraved in inconclusive forms or rhythmic repetitions. The sculptor unconsciously searches to formulate an idea about the plan, whilst he hammers away on the surface, denting it, looking for a syntax for the idea.

Within this significant effort of concentration, for a moment, his sculpturing thought was almost natural. So much so that the duel between the form and the non-form, pursuing uninterruptedly the whole of the work, was finally exteriorized in a far more ample opposition between the idea, the intelligible element and the increated substance, the material, the nature. Vlavianos squeezed out this duel in the geometric elements, which he introduces into the composition — the geometric element which before (less than 5 years ago) defined itself as informal. The structures, with bolts and screws regularly distributed at equal intervals, and deliberately introduced into the assembled conglomerations of its materials, could all say that this work, always open to new opinions and new growths, is discipline, is logic. And, for the artist, paradoxically passive. In contrast, we now come to the parts which are joined by chance. These result, as we would say, involuntary and uncontrolled from the pressure of the pieces of iron that he welds vertically in a rhythmic direction, or at times, more frenetically in a spiral movement. Here is the moment in which the artist in the sculptor gives himself over to the demon inside himself, aggressive and unpredictable. Once it was completed he came to us to say that this was his ‘action-sculpture’.

From the opposition of these two elements which first appear isolated, one from the other, he starts off by trying a new expression of synthesis. With great effect, what is born from this fundamental opposition is an ambivalent being. One of those which cohabits this magnetic area of the contemporary imagination where the spectre of the ancient past lives, promiscuously, along with the automation of the most current technological lucubrations.

Nicolas Vlavianos, long descended from the ancient Greeks, and like all of us who have a thousand ancestries behind us, makes part of the same family as Paolozzi, who are not content to remain, as the bourgeoisie, on the throne of that mythical area. And so they attempt to penetrate it to give the human being a mythical dimension and the mythical a human dimension. Their tricks are, perhaps, a pathetic attempt to call up the spectres and automatons to come and inhabit it, together, as if in a dove-cote.

Mário Pedrosa
Rio de Janeiro, 1966