Yannis Papayannis
NEu Tymes
June 2019
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About extraordinary humans and their achievements
Creative Direction, Editorial Design Publication by Petros Vasiadis
Curator’s note Yannis Papayannis is involved in an expressionismbased practice, bringing his canvases into action through a strong colour palette, gestural brushstrokes, and narratives that insert, in a subtle manner, dissonance, like a disagreeable auditory experience of sound that lacks cohesion. And indeed, being inspired by musical compositions, he engages in a very particular process arranging expressive elements and colours, as a composer would score a series of sounds and notes, still in a more discorded way . In his earliest work he described himself as self-diver in incidents due to his desire in depicting occurrences, either historical events or random everyday happenings. His compositions, rich in scenic elements and details, as directing a film scene, with a spirit of experimentation, revealed a sense of an art as impulsive and sincerely felt as the stimuli from life itself In his most recent series of works abstract patterns of form, colour and line have been further developed, influenced by music and its motifs of sound. With no obvious focus on attention, yet with the aim of triggering a profound contemplational response to the
'audience', Yannis Papayannis does not allow for passive viewing. He automatically pulls the viewer into his outstanding, rebellious and inventive compositions. Through abstraction and with no intension of accurate depiction of a visual reality he uses expressive lines, bold colours and gestural marks, as an alternative pathway to reveal his unconscious mind. Additionally, he makes extensive use of written text lines prominently, as one of the central artistic elements of his work. This, overall, free way of creating art, along with the adopted textural style of linear narratives and, moreover, the associations among written phrases, images and meanings, have developed into Yannis Papayannis’ personal powerful and genuine signature language. n-art.org/yannis-papayannis
Nelly Fili
Archaeologist-Art Historian/Museologist/Curator Founder of |’n Art| Art & Publishing House n-art.org Official Partner of the |International Foundation for Greece (IFG)| www.if-gr.org/who-we-are
Yannis Papayannis
For the NEu TYMES magazine, I have prepared the presentation of four works by four composers: Berio's 3rd part from his Simfonia, Andriessen's De Staat, Xenakis's Eonta and Grisey's Partiels. These works are part of my new endeavour called "Visually Consumed Music". Each presentation is comprised of large drawings on paper and acrylics of various sizes on canvas. The decision to start visualising contemporary music started after observing that contemporary music and contemporary visual art have common characteristics, like shifting focus away from aesthetic beauty, large scale, experimental media, technology and scientific innovations. Thus by turning not just sounds but complete music works into pictorial equivalents might create images that would surprise and beguile me. My decision was both courageous and credulous at the same time. The command "let's go ahead with it", silenced bewilderments, difficulties and hesitations.
Contemporary art feels like swimming in a dark ocean. If someone tosses you a lifejacket for your rescue, the game is over. The game is to keep swimming in dark waters unafraid incessantly. I feel the relationship between my art and contemporary music is one of a migrant in an exotic land trying to communicate with the locals using a sign language. Abstract Art's visual language allowed me to interpret the plethora of methodically arranged sounds into long lines comprised of coloured signs and drawing gestures. These lines were used as a primary material slithering on large surfaces, forming variations of unpredictable compositions. These variations signify the treacherous quicksand ground of my visualisation method because one cannot draw a real picture of a piece of music. Music is for the ear, not the eye. My variations are proposals or my subjective suggestions of how this piece of music could appear on a surface as a painting. Therefore I developed a systematic procedure to carefully step by step approach and understand the secret language and architecture of a musical composition. To begin with, I had to get accustomed to the music characteristics: the dissonant harmonies, the complex rhythms, the synthetic and unexpected sounds and above all its most important aspect: this music' s mysterious beauty or ugliness that is only experienced by the
listener if he is ready to accept all those innovations. To start this transformation, I listen to every second separately, never missing one or changing its order. I keep trying to decipher the source of every instrument that caused the sound, its volume, whether sonorous or soft or silent. I imagine a piece of music as a journey, consisting of seconds instead of places. I have to listen to it in its entirety repeatedly to bring a mental picture in my mind. Then I can draw a simple line drawing of this picture on a white surface. I later use it as a track, where each visually animated second of music, from the first to the last, with their temporal continuity is placed one next to the other. An image composed of densely and sparingly written areas, which are sometimes interrupted by space, slowly emerges. Then I decide what colour would represent each instrument or a piece of unnamed music, to create a stripe on paper composed of coloured marks and lines as loud or soft as the played sound. I don't consider this body of work as a translation of music into visual art because this requires a thorough knowledge of music but as a visual experience of a musical performance and a thoughtful response of a curious member of the audience who wishes to decipher contemporary music's rich, strange language to the benefit of his art.
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EONTA
They say that Xenakis' work is about mathematical formulas translated into beautiful, exciting and convincing music. Eonta is chamber music, and its composition is a synergy between the composer and an IBM 7090 computer which generated musical sequences based on probability functions. The work is full of shifting densities, dynamics, registers and pitch collections. Eonta open with an athletic solo piano that races and jumps over the keyboard, using frenetic activity, even after the introduction of the brasses. Cadmium red dots was my choice to describe piano action contrasting the blue hues of the brasses and greens and oranges that describe strange electronic sounds.
Xenakis, Eonta I, 100x100cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
"Art, and above all, music has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks to draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. " Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis, Eonta II, 100x100cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
"Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one." Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis, Eonta III, 100x100cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
"Do you realize that we're meteorites; almost as soon as we're born we have to disappear?." Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis, Eonta IV, 61x46cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018 Eonta (beings in Mycenaean Greek) is a homage by composer Xenakis to philosopher Parmenides. My first impression was that I was listening to a piano concerto, but the sounds of the piano and the rest of the instruments echo unexpected computer and machinery sounds. The reality is that Eonta is the synergy between a composer and a computer. It is music generated by computer musical sequences in a stochastic and symbolic mood based on theories of probabilities and logistics Â
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A work comprised of preliminary drawings, placed one on top of the other, to form the sketch of the work called EONTA.
Xenakis, Eonta, 592 x 50cm, coloured pencils on paper, 2017
"The collision cicadas in a thousands of totality, is a
of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of summer field. These sonic events are made out of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as new sonic event.." Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis, Eonta V, 150 x 150cm, coloured pencils on paper, 2017
"...the daughters of the Sun made haste to escort me, having left the halls of Night for the light." Parmenides
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DE STAAT
According to Andriessen, he wrote De Staat as a contribution to the debate about the relation of music to politics. He used passages from Plato to illustrate his points. The music is aggressively lyric, with moments of gigantic tension, explosive release and Stravinskian rhythmic power and idioms. The problem I faced was how much gestural activity should take place as I try hard my brushstrokes to correspond to the time and pitch of the sound. The gestural exaggeration was replaced by colour intensity but still the piece's unsettling character resulted in a non convincing realisation. Then a roll on paper follows where music and texts are laid like visible carpet patterns. Aggressiveness was weakened. Then I compressed the elements on a small canvas and aggressiveness erupted, but elegance was lost. Therefore my approach to De Staat has to be all the works as a unity, as they sum up all the properties of the original work.
Louis Andriessen, De Staat, I, 152x122cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
Andriessen wrote:
"De Staat (The Republic) is a contribution to the debate about the relation of music to politics. Many composers view the act of composing as, somehow, above social conditioning. I contest that. How you arrange your musical material, the techniques you use and the instruments you score for, are largely determined by your own social circumstances and listening experience, and the availability of financial support. I do agree, though, that abstract musical material - pitch, duration and rhythm - are beyond social conditioning: it is found in nature. However, the moment the musical material is ordered it becomes culture and hence a social entity."
Louis Andriessen, De Staat, II, 76x102cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018 I am a gems digger. I turn music sound to unrefined gems and phrases of music like a series of pearls. I like it if my paintings are seen as a chest with scattered gems. But here, surprisingly, the same gems form a kind of forest.
Louis Andriessen, De Staat, III, 61x46cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018 A painting from a series featuring compressed writing, where I am deliberately putting on a small canvas all the elements from the detailed research I have done on a piece of music knowing that this immense conglomeration in such a small area will cease their readability and turn them into short gestural brushstrokes.
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Louis Andriessen, "De Staat" (details), coloured pencils on paper roll, 2018. The work is 400 x 100 cm. The following details are approximately 100 x 100 cm
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SINFONIA
The 3rd movement is a dense collage of music. A Mahler's glorification with quotations of multiple excerpts of Mahler's Scherzo from Symphony number 2 and other phrases from various composers that resemble Mahler's Scherzo. At the same time, eight voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources like the Unnameable by Beckett. I resisted doing a collage as after reading about the piece it would be the obvious thing to do. I felt the music like a journey to an untrodden place without any visible land and borders. A mind map composed of names of composers, phrases by Beckett and poems, directions and coloured eruptions.
Sinfonia, Movement III, Luciano Berio, III, 80 x 210cm, coloured pencils and iridescent white acrylic on canvas, 2017
A rough transparent drawing on a surface covered with a cloud of iridescent white, making the composition light and floating.
Luciano Berio, Sinfonia, Movement III, V, 61 x 46cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018 One of a series of small paintings using all the elements from the large studies. A compressed version of the larger works, like holding a piece of symphonic music in your hand.
Sinfonia, Movement III, Luciano Berio, II 152 x 212cm, coloured pencils and tracing paper on paper, 2017 A study for visualising this orchestral patchwork. "Sinfonia" is a piece that a visual artist quickly realises and appreciates its intentions, which are to juxtapose music passages from various composers into a single work. Here I was able to experiment with coloured marks and written phrases.
Sinfonia, Movement III, Luciano Berio, IV, 152 x 152cm, coloured pencils and coloured photocopy image on paper, 2017 One of a series of allegorical paintings, a wager with myself to make pictures about a specific short piece of music: Luciano Berio's 3rd Part of his Sinfonia. Seemingly disparate things like interviews, photos, artworks and other fragments of music, I thought they related directly, incidentally or metaphorically to the 3rd Part, helped me to describe voices, silences, soft and deafening sounds emanating from within Berio's Sinfonia.
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Sinfonia, Movement III, Luciano Berio, I, 152 x 220cm, coloured pencils and tracing paper on paper, 2017 In this study, the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia is seen as a map that tracks a ship's sailing routes. The music imitates the moods of the sea, calm, rough or dangerous and the spoken passages from Beckett's "The Unnamed", as names of islands, cities and countries.
PARTIELS
Partiels is spectral music. Grisey assigns different instruments to each partial in such a way to harmonically and gesturally model the dynamic temporal, evolution of the attack. Thus the opening features the successive entrance of lower partials with the fifth and the ninth to be louder. The piece makes use of some of the different tones to create harmonies. The first large drawings revealed very elegant patterns which gained momentum with the partials to be visible, but the loudness was silenced. In the two acrylics that followed the stretched brush marks aimed at increasing the sound and bring back the expressionistic element that was missing from the drawings.
Gerard Grisey, Partiels, III, 150x150cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
Grisey said:
"We are musicians and our model is sound, not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture" But in reality, Grisey used mathematics, used computer science and electronics to produce his music. Now I am using his music to create my paintings.
Gerard Grisey, Partiels, IV, 61x46cm, acrylic on canvas, 2018
"Everybody can have an idea. Everybody. The problem is to have a second one. This is a greater problem. And the major problem is to know where and when to bring in this second idea" Gerard Grisey
Partiels, Gerard Grisey, II, 152 x 200cm, coloured pencils on paper, 2017 Every time a piece of music proves extremely confusing for my memory, I depict it in the form of a spiral. The spiral for me is the best form to describe elusive music, on canvas or paper. Partiels' impressive trombone opening is the only moment someone can remember. The rest of the piece is not memory friendly but a bumpy road of mild and loud sounds.
Partiels, Gerard Grisey, I, 152 x 152cm, coloured pencils on paper, 2017
"Tonal music had the wonderful advantage of being stabilized for a long time so that people knew the predictable patterns. There was a first layer in the duration and memory of the listener upon which a composer like Beethoven could play his music and say "Okay, you' re all for waiting for that type of modulation, but I, -Beethoven- am going to design it differently. So I will trigger a surprise to the listener". So this game between predictability and unpredictability, expectation and surprises is what makes time living and musical. How can we now make such a game between predictability and unpredictability without an established music language?" Gerard Grisey
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www. y annispapayannis. c om
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