Takis: Ancient artist, prophet, soothsayer, magician. Definitely unique.
The exhibition in Andros (22/6-2/11) is divided into two parts. In the Old Wing of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is reopening after its recent renovation, the “Signals” section will feature an extensive presentation of the iconic works that contributed to Takis‘s international acclaim, while the New Wing of the Museum will exhibit in turn his first bronze and iron sculptures, “Flowers”, “Flower Idols”, “Idols”, “Dials”, “Electronic Reliefs” and “Sea Oscillation Hydrodynamics”. A room will be dedicated to his erotic works and his very special relationship with music.
In the same period, the exhibition in Athens will focus on his magnetic works (“Télésculptures”, “Télépeintures”, “Télélumières”, “Défis à la gravité”, “Sphères électro-magnétiques”, “Musicales”, “Murs magnétiques”, “Magnétrons” and “Isidos Plants”) and video projections of ephemeral works such as the Hydro-magnetic Sculpture of 1969 or the Games of 1972.
The exhibitions in Athens and Andros aim to introduce the viewer to the magic of science and the deep knowledge of art. This is a remarkable initiative by the Gulandris Museum, a large-scale tribute exhibition that one would expect a public or state museum to put on, wanting to give a prominent Greek international artist his due by showing the full range of his work, which until now has been exhibited on a smaller scale or in fragments.
Takis’ world borrows elements from the vastness and mysteries of the universe. His art is the most serious thing a viewer, or even a child, can encounter today, because the playfulness of his work has always been an integral part of his aesthetic perception, as has sharing his work with as many people as possible.
In a career that spanned nearly three-quarters of a century, this “instinctive scientist”, as he called himself, was interested in making visible the invisible forces of the universe, and energy was both the subject and the primary medium of his art. He harnessed forces of nature and technology that no other artist had touched so boldly, introducing new forms and themes, especially in magnetism, included movement in groundbreaking works, and expanded the identity of art.
Takis belonged to a generation that, after World War II, aimed to redefine art by focusing less on personal expression and more on tangible facts and objective reality, which led him to turn to scientific principles concerning color, pattern, and movement. This unconventional, restless man, a genius of an artist, turned to a mixture of media and improvisation as early as his first kinetic sculptures in the late 1950s, enchanted by the flashing lights, steam and rolling stock at Calais railway station while travelling from London to Paris. This produced some of his most popular and recognisable works, the “Signals”, and he would go on to experiment with using magnets, electromagnets, gravity and radar, and incorporate sound into his works.
“Thanks to magnetism, Takis explored the fourth dimension, as he liked to describe it, a space that, out of convenience, we characterize as empty, while it is incessantly animated by forces that not only elude us but govern even the smallest detail of our lives. For Takis, everything is magnetism: the beneficial energy of the sun, the source of everything; the bond that unites us with the earth, which nourishes us; the attraction or breathlessness we feel for our own kind; the music that gives vitality to the nature that surrounds us. That is why the exploration of magnetism is not limited to the simple scientific approach, which is carried out only in laboratories. It is an adventure that offers us the opportunity to experience artistic excitement, which, behind its playful aspect, invites us to a truly metaphysical contemplation,” says the curator of the exhibition Maria Koutsomalli-Moreau.
Describing himself as an “archaic artist” and calling himself a “prophet, seer and magician”, Takis’ forms and ideas existed outside and beyond any conventional discussion of aesthetics. Rooted in ancient cosmology and the careful observation of nature, he was in possession of mysterious possibilities that have fascinated thinkers since time immemorial: perpetual motion, the music of the spheres, and the secrets of life and immortality.
As Toby Kamps writes, he was unique because of his ability to create on two levels. He was at once a prominent and influential member of a cosmopolitan avant-garde, as well as an individual, as he described himself. Occasionally maintaining ateliers in London, Paris, New York and Athens, he exhibited his work in galleries and museums around the world, forged friendships and collaborated with a host of prominent figures to redefine art in the post-war period. These include – to name but a few – the artists Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Yves Klein, musicians Earle Brown and John Cage, choreographer Jaap Flier, director Kostas Gavras and many American poets of the Beat Generation.
Takis (Panagiotis Vassilakis) was born in 1925 in Athens. His teenage years were marked by the hardships and persecution of the war, the Occupation and the Civil War. He decided to become a painter at the age of 17, coming from a family that struggled to survive and did not accept his inclination for fine arts. The courageous and undaunted young man painted in a basement and imagined himself an artist. Inspired by the likes of Picasso and Giacometti, Takis remained self-taught by conviction, with art representing a means to escape from difficult circumstances and touch greatness. As he wrote, his goal was “to escape from suffering through the mind”. In a studio he shared with his childhood friends, the artists Pano Raymondo and Mino Argyrakis, and with his interest shifting to sculpture, he began creating plaster busts and heads, and later began working in stone and granite, materials with life that cultivated his sensitivity to natural materials.
In 1953, declaring that “Greece is a prison”, he left for his first trip to Paris. Having now settled there permanently, he quickly found his place as a rising star in the vibrant art world of the French capital and became associated with important artists of his time. In 1990, in an interview, he said: “I was born in the Mediterranean, I need to talk, I need to exchange thoughts and ideas, to enter into a dialectical game […]. On Odessa Street there was a small café where I met [artists Yves] Klein, [Daniel] Spoerri and [Jean] Tinguely. When we weren’t working, we would talk for hours. We would look at our works and be terribly jealous of each other. It was interesting and exciting at the same time. In the 1950s Europe had just come out of the war and everything had to be rebuilt. Everything was changing and therefore it was necessary to question everything.”
A short journey through the fundamental works of a great creator
Wanting to test the communicative power of his “Signals”, Takis began placing them in real environments, on rooftops next to TV antennas as a commentary on media culture and in squares as he started out, in the early 1960s, he began placing electric lights on their tops, giving them a new emotional dimension, “a poetics of space tinged with sadness and frustrated desires,” as his curator and friend Guy Brett wrote. The thin metal rods, bright at the edges, reflected something of the phantasmagoria and psychedelia of ’60s pop culture. It’s no coincidence that Paul McCartney acquired one of them, and John Lennon recalled how he fell in love with Yoko Ono at Takis’s 1966 exhibition at London’s Indica gallery.
The “Signals” movement was a natural field of exploration for Takis. “The materials of a kinetic work may age, its movements remain forever in the present,” Guy Brett writes of their eternal, fascinating qualities that linked kinetic art to the natural cycles of birth, death and rebirth.
In 1958, he introduces magnetism as a key part of his sculpture, creating unforgettable telomagnetic sculptures of needles and threads that pulsate with the action of a magnet. In these, having transcended the limits of the medium, he defies the force of gravity and the traditional sculptural process, making him a pioneer, culminating in his performance “L’impossible: un homme dans l’espace” (1960) at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris, in which he presents the poet Sinclair Beiles travelling through space, reciting the Magnetic Manifesto. He incorporates into his art one of the fundamental forces of the universe while exclaiming: “To defy gravity is a form of lightness!” Marcel Duchamp honoured his enthusiasm, calling him “a cheerful worker of magnetic fields and a signifier of soft railways.”
This revolutionary artistic discovery that allowed him to move beyond the symbolic and into the real is described by the French writer Alain Jouffroy: “”That’s it,” he told me, “I found it. It sounded exactly like Archimedes’ find. […] And he showed me the first telomagnetic sculpture (I was the one who coined the term the next day), where metallic elements were suspended by the force of a magnet. So, for the first time, magnetic energy was introduced into the composition of a sculpture. It was incorporated into it as air is incorporated into Baroque sculpture. Takis’ joy and enthusiasm could not be described. Takis believed that this discovery represented a new ‘fourth dimension’ in art.”
With his metal objects floating and pulsating, communicating not only in the symbolic but also in the realistic magnetic field, the impression of a “living work of art”, his discovery was considered a revolution in art history, having incorporated into sculpture truly invisible energy in the form of magnetism.
In addition to magnetism, Takis, with his first “Télésculptures” (Télésculptures), introduced materials such as raw wood, metal and pieces of equipment collected from military service stations into improvised sculpture constructions, something innovative at the time he created them – later evolving to become a trademark of his work. Elegant drawings that act as floating diagrams of invisible force vectors appear on black panels, “Magnetic Reliefs,” a series of wall works begun in the 1960s with magnets, wires and metal elements.
As early as the 1950s, wanting to explore metals, he used bronze in his “Espaces intérieurs” (Interior Spaces), as he called his spherical works, with marks of concentric circles placed on the ground. In an interview with Jean Clay he says of them: “I find that people today are either completely upright or completely curled up. The big city dweller is wrinkled, clutching, needing medical attention. In cafes, I often see people sitting at tables who are dead. I would like to remind you that we must be upright, feel naked, liberated, out of the world… I used all means to make the viewer come out of himself.”
Later, he uses marble for his interiors, respectfully following the veins of each piece in his hands to reveal, like a secret, its characteristics and peculiarities. In his autobiography ESTAFILADES, The Legend of TAKIS, he writes: “Not for a moment can one imagine that a stone has a real and active life […]. We ignore that it has a heart, a centre around which a whole world orbits.” He will also experiment with a third material, stainless steel, which is resistant to extreme conditions, and mark the surface with seemingly random scratches.
Having an interest in nature, flora and fauna, he creates a series of works with materials he has collected at random or from blacksmiths and landfills, and by recycling materials such as iron and bronze he makes flowers with gears, pieces of pipe or spare parts, which Nicholas Kalas writes also act as signals, of course this time: the projections of their stigmas symbolize an abundance of nectar, while at the same time calling out to all the insects that carry the pollen.
When Vasilis and Elisa Goulandris acquired his Flowers in 1979, Takis accompanied the sculptures with the following message: “A thistle and a sunflower. You can greet the sunflower because it is looking at you. The truth is that you should stroke the thistle because it protects the soil where it lives.”
He named the plants he created in 1970 “Isidos Plants”, giving them the name of the goddess whose worship spread throughout the Mediterranean basin and Greece and inspired Takis, who always professed to be a polytheist.
In 1961, and while beginning to experiment with sound and music, he discovered a fascinating electrical element that he would immediately want to incorporate into his art, the mercury arc rectifier (diode), an invention for increasing the voltage of current in industrial and civil installations that, when in contact with a magnet, its glow pulsates. Thus, he creates the “Telelights”, installations that Alain Jouffroy describes as “the most important of all Takis’ works”. In 1981, Takis said of the “Telephoto”: ‘We must understand that these elements represent for me a nostalgia for electricity and for a whole equipment that is disappearing, just as we are entering an absolutely electronic age’. When he exhibits his related “Trois Totems – Espace musical” (Three Totems – Musical Space) at the Centre Pompidou, the audience will be fascinated by the harmonious coexistence of light, sound and movement.
His famous series of “Murs magnétiques” (Magnetic Walls), metallic elements suspended at a distance from monochrome paintings – an appeal to gravity, a play on shadow, movement and imagination – introduce a third dimension to his work. “What we knew about painting until now was an object or image painted on a surface. Let’s let go of our imagination and see objects coming towards the painting from the sky,” he said.
About two decades after he had created his first busts and human figures, in 1974, he began to explore eroticism through parts of the human body taken from moulds of live models, with almost ostentatiously rendered details of male and female anatomy. With the sensuality and sexuality that dominates his life, disdaining the inculcation of sexuality by Judeo-Christian culture, he sculpts youthful drive and desire, celebrates free bodies and erotic pleasure with poetic rawness, and celebrates the temporary triumph of love over death. The pull of his magnetic fields is expressed differently here and, as Pierre Restany writes, “the works exude an immediate, immense force of sensual attraction that stirs the gaze; sex is felt in its elemental, primordial, tangible power, at the level of man’s basic motivations of course, but in their full integration into cosmic energy.”
Takis’ world borrows elements from the vastness and mysteries of the universe. His art is the most serious thing a viewer, or even a child, can encounter today, because the playful dimension of his work has always been an integral part of his aesthetic perception, as has sharing his work with as many people as possible.
Until his death in 2019, this tireless inventor and creator, who alongside his sculptural activity developed sets, costumes and musical compositions for theatre and film productions, such as Elkesis (1973) at the Dutch National Festival, the film Section Spéciale (1975) by Kostas Gavras and Sophocles’ Electra (1983) at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, directed by Michael Cacoyannis, he never ceased to explore the function of art in social space, honouring the intelligence of materials, giving life to the insignificant, worshipping light and mystical darkness. He turned his gaze to phenomena and the real and, drawing from it, managed to transcend it with works that excite the imagination, provoke curiosity and the search for an inner truth through observation. The first major retrospective exhibition in Athens and Andros, dedicated to his great and original work, with more than 150 works, is a challenge through which we will rediscover the great Greek artist, a dive into the ingenuity, wisdom and humour with which he managed to converse with the present, persistently stimulating our curiosity and imagination.
Find more information about the art exhibition here.
This article was published in the print LiFO.
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