APOSTOLOS KOUSTAS
When I first saw the works of Apostolos Koustas, I surrendered to their immediacy, well concealed in their simple lines, their incisions and shapes.
Later, more calmly, I summoned up the thoughts of Nobel Laureate George Seferis from his three secret poems and whispered them in my own words. Our works are the children of many.
Umberto Eco embraced this collective memory when he said that those who think we live for only a few years are mistaken: “Our life is measured in millennia”.
Indeed. Koustas, possibly unwittingly, asserts this firmly in his works. In his lines, the history and prehistory of ancient Greek art travels on land and sea, its own symbols and ‘codes’ open to an age-old dialogue and new versions.
His skill reins in the sharpness of the Greek light and transfers it, ‘engraved’, to the painted surface – his own record that illuminates symbols and references obliquely, yet simply, for “the myth of truth was born simple”.
On the other hand, still from the same source, Greece emerges as a supreme reference point: Greece as a cultural area. A land that is home to the Muses and the arts, to poetry in the broadest sense, and the ample embrace of the Aegean, a superb composition of natural and cultural features.
Apostolos Koustas boldly creates his own compositions. Traces of the ships incised on Cycladic frying-pan vessels, memories of the Aegean, shapes from the Geometric period and Classical times, are all devoutly registered in his works.
The challenging ‘script’ of the Phaistos disk, the spirit of Delphi, the Sirens, the Argo and the Centaur, can all be detected or named in his paintings, so that these serve as a modern synopsis of the age-old history of art. At the point where the daily prayers of men become petrified, the artist imprints his own prayer, fills the silence of centuries with ‘words’, and plays his part in the unbroken continuity of art.
Archaeologist – Art Critic
Dr. Vivi Vassilopoulou