Achilles Droungas

"There is in man a veritable will to exercise his intellect"

Gaston Bachelard
 

''Thoughts on the paintings and graphics of Achilles Droungas 
by Yannis Kolokotronis"

Achilles Drounga's painting enjoys a unique privilege. It can receive, equally, criticism and acceptance, rejection and preference. It is the painting of deliberate thought, but also that of the first impression. 

However, he who will succumb to the fascination of first sight when viewing the artist's pictures, will find himself in an impasse when it comes to assessing Droungas' work objectively. Because, if the ease in reading it is a good criterion when attracting someone to a picture, in the same measure the approach to its hidden meanings stumbles against these meanings and is stopped short. The viewer is checked; what is demanded of him is the sincere, open-minded and multiple approach. One that is not moderate, not condescending, that does not wish to be soothing. An approach which must remain ironical in order to be scientific, as Gaston Bachelard has shown' which must open up and unfold, like the "open society" described by Carl Popper' which passes by separate, partial approximation in order to embrace the whole.
In the work of Achilles Droungas, we demote the need to understand when we evaluate his art by the absolute standards of the romantic gaze of the ancient Greek world. When we allow intuitive feeling, leading to reverie, to prevail over reason, which urges the mind to create a fantasy of the ancient Greek world, conforming to contemporary standards. It is as though we refused to accept that there can be respective Homer in another age, because the original one lived out his life during his time. Can we not today feel the same amazement before the sight of birds being fooled by a bunch of painted grapes created by a Zeuxis of our day? (We are referring to the well-known incident related by Pliny, and involving the two famous 5th-century painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios).

The answer is yes and no. Yes, because we would be interested in the picture as a picture. For no other reason, than for the sake of continuity; so that we may be able to say that "there are still such artists today, who paint in such a manner". No, if is to be examined under the light of the parameters of history of the forms of art and it proves that the entire undertaking has finally turned out to be like a broken money-box unable to retain the accumulated savings, the small and large coins of the theory of art.

The pictures of Achilles Droungas, in order to be read, require the knowledge of the most recent history of contemporary art. They begin with photorealism, a movement which swept across Europe and America, after 1965, when it first appeared, and which the artist came to know, at close range, since he was established in London at the time. It was a movement which superseded some very important currents of thought in art (conceptual art, minimal art, etc), which only today have been partially reinstated by history within its pages, with important exhibitions in the great museums of Europe and United States.
 

During that period, Achilles Droungas created his original series of graphics, which through the medium of Christie's were directed to certain great museums of the world, such as the MoMa of New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Museum of Wales, the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris and other important private and public collections.

His decision to return to Greece marked a change in his course of direction and influenced his own personal research in the field of photo-realism.

Instead of following a natural course, which would have led eventually to the same sort of results as those attained by the British and American mind, the overstressing of the giant metropolises of the consumer society, through the compositions of Malcolm Morley, or the solitary figures of Lucian Freud, the paintings of Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, Richard Estes, or the sculptures of John de Andre, Achilles Droungas was led towards a disciplined intellectual form of thought, obedient to the standards of the Greek ambience.

We must not expect him to be an artist who would make copies of history. What he does is converse with its knowledge, as a scientist would use the instruments in his studio. It is not by chance that Achilles Droungas has not clothed his paintings in the skin of pop art publicity. He did not paint for advertising purposes. He did not produce labels as for consumer products. He worked on dreams as dreams, not as subjects referring to the subconscious aspirations of surrealism; he painted landscapes as the city dweller, in flight from the city, seeks for them in his imagination; his portraits were rendered like the soul-revealing performance of an actor; his interiors were conceived as stage sets and, in his still-life’s he enriched the traditional subjects (objects, flowers, fruits), familiar, to us, by giving them all sorts of new associations and connotations.

It is that, more or less, what can be outlined as Achilles Droungas' contribution to our painting. He has always been absolutely sincere in his attitude towards painting and its adventures and vicissitudes; in step with the spirit if his time, yet refracting its lights through the prism of his own native land; preserving a critical intellectual stance towards the Greek reality of today, its slowness in catching up, its lack of organization.

May an exhibition such as this, retrospective in character, of the graphics and paintings of Achilles Droungas at the Pierides Museum, in 1984, be a contribution to the evaluation of the unwritten pages of the contemporary Greek history of art. A small contribution toward the shaping of our modern artistic consciousness. ''