Grigoris Semitecolo

Ramiken is pleased to present a show of paintings made by Grigoris Semitecolo (1935-2014). The show, curated by Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos, focuses on Semitecolo's landscapes made between 1991 and 2003. This is the first exhibition of his paintings in New York. Who was this artist? Younger Greek artists know him as a legend, a gentle but uncompromising philosopher of art from the mad sixties and seventies whom Greece can call its own. He was a deadpan provocateur, with a genial, open personality that provided the perfect expressive medium for his friends in the experimental music scene of Athens. His happenings were truly, utterly weird, performed for both the tiny but hardcore performance art spaces across Europe and the uninitiated village audiences on the island of Samos. Looking at Semitecolo's paintings from the 1990s, made in the sixth decade of his life, the architecture of several millennia is broken down into pure metropolitan geometry. Set against the delicate fading ochre of the final seconds of disappearing daylight, these are paintings of the sunset of modernism. Landscapes littered with fragments of vast formal ideals, stretching from the columns of ancient Greece to the skyscrapers of New York City, buildings or rubble, glowing with orange then red then brown burning tones. His paintings put the shelters of our world in front of a open horizon, unjudged, the fingertips of our eyes allowed to brush both the broken shards of the Acropolis and the sharp prick of the Empire State Building. What did we build? These paintings make us wonder. No answers but another sunset. He was a Cycladic artist, working high and low, his side hustle casting plaster casts of ancient Cycladic figurines for the souvenir shops around the Acropolis. One of these forms, the viola shape, shows up over and over in his paintings, marking a personal symbolic connection to the improvisational musical subversions of his scene in Athens and to his partner Nelli Semitecolo, herself a preeminent classical pianist in Europe. Semitecolo's notes also echo out across the 20th century, from the luminous structural paintings of Kay Sage to the land art finish of Michael Heizer's City. If anything, Semitecolo's stunningly beautiful late works, hitched to the periphery, prove that the avant-garde is not a trend that can be brushed aside by a few cycles of recent, disgustingly manipulative capitalism. His surrealism followed only the path of the sun. The endgame of Apollo. "Strange how every sunset looks just like a sunrise. Can you tell the difference?" —ME

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