V l a v i a n o s ,   p a s t   a n d   p r e s e n t                                    b y   W a l t e r   Z a n i n i
Sao Paulo, 1978/98

In the second half of the 1950’s, in the circle of sculptors at the rive gauche, Nicolas Vlavianos was a young man with a promising career. He was particularly

stimulated by ancient sculpture and strongly influenced by Henry Moore. He had had valuable experience with Zadkine and also in Lazlo Szabo’s Academie du Feu. His work was exhibited in the Rodin Museum, destined for future generations, and was selected for several exhibitions, such as the Realités Nouvelles. He was a young man searching for his own identity at a time when Paolozzi, Müller, Lardera and César had already settled down themselves as iron sculptors.

In 1956, at the age of 27, Vlavianos left his home in Athens as a painter. However, it was during his first encounter with Paris that he was to opt for a three-dimensional form of expression and, following the example of many other artists of that time, he was to elect iron as his preferred material of work. And so it was that he initiated his way through the most diverse cultural experiences. By 1961 he had to leave Paris when he was invited to represent Greece in the VI São Paulo Biennial and it was during this visit that he decided to live and work in Brazil.

The ancient artistic traditions of the civilization from which he had descended had always been present in the modern work to which he aspired. Furthermore, this fact was also plainly evident throughout the work of his colleagues in the Parisian Greek community. However, the weight of this cultural tradition with all its vast, classical Hellenic past also provoked uneasiness in face of these ancient spirits. And so, here was their world and atmosphere. The same environment where Coulentianos, half a generation before, took on an avant-garde position, where one could also find Andréou and daring Takis emerging with his telemagnetism — there were such different assets like Sklavos and Vlavianos, faithful on their ways to the ancestral materiality of sculpture.

Untitled, 1960. Welded iron, 52 x 37 x 10 cm. Private col.

The time that Vlavianos spent in Paris coincided with a phase of great vitality in sculpture which used welded iron. Before the use on a grand scale of new technologic materials, these years contributed with imagistic aspects of extreme significance to the overall history of contemporary sculpture, included the United States. This moment allowed notable possibilities for the exploitation of a form of expression which had in fact begun decades before. There hailed the beginning of a remarkable liberation from the previous limitations which had reduced this art form merely to the imitation of painting. There was a moment where the informal tendencies broke off with tradition and the relative unity of the abstract-geometric manifestations. On the other hand, relatively well-known artists — including Vlavianos — were casting doubts upon the controversy which separated figures and abstract forms into two stagnant and absolutely distinct universes. It would be difficult to separate this period of deep questioning and doubt-raising from the company that he was keeping at the time, and indeed from the relationships that he had been tying. In particular, his close associations with Szabo and the studios that he had been frequenting for some considerable time, led him towards a comprehension of art more in terms of the intimate communion between man and the vital values of nature. The result of this was a surreal-expressionist vision of the world as portrayed in the sculpture of the "Paris School".

Keeping a distance between himself and radical attitudes, Vlavianos produced several small dimension figures with the use of iron and welding. These figures were made up of successive planes or geometric segments and were often both sensorial and enigmatic. It was how his hybrid entities began to appear — the "Metamorphoses". These were contiguous to some other allegoric works as well as to the elaborate totems with their refined sense of proportions and which had as their aim the search for lines and surfaces in movement. In a statement at the time, Vlavianos said that there was a ‘cosmic rhythm’ in all beings and things. The clear principle of organization which from this moment on dominated the apprehending three-dimensional structure of his work did not prevent him from being attentive to the exploitation of all the available ways of enriching details of the relief and artistic creation from his years in Paris. Nor, indeed, did he forget the significant developments that the twentieth century had brought to sculpture. Ever since this time his method of work has entailed preparatory designs.

Figure, 1964. Welded iron, 54 x 18 x 15 cm. Col. Baendereck/Coelho da Fonseca, São Paulo.

On settling in Brazil — where interest in sculpture had never been great — his work evolved along the lines of the established premisses. However, it can be observed that there were the beginnings of something ‘unsettled’ in his work. Something which the artist attributed to his feelings of being in a completely new environment. With the easy access that he now had to material which had been lacking in Paris he began to design the work of his repertoire, in much greater proportions. He also utilized déchets which he often recovered with paint.