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The different
stages
of the carving process for
the wood sculpture
"Falling into grace" |
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Born in Greece,
near the Volos marble quarries,
he studied art and sculpture in
his native 'cradle of western
civilization', before setting
out as a twenty-seven year-old
for Britain, Spain and Bali.
This started his quest for the
traces of an ancient vanished
wisdom which inspires his work.
It led him from Egypt to Mongolia,
from Yucatan to Cambodia. He visited
Siberian shamans, Indian medicine
men, steeping himself in their
symbolic language, and finally
settled, or at least hangs his
hat, in the highlands of Bali
- itself an ancient cradle of
artists and mystics. |
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| The depth and range
of his travels have exposed Filippos,
more than most of us, to the globally
scattered clues of high wisdom
which was once shared universally
by vanished cultures. Megaliths
and petrogplyphs, yantras and
zodiacal systems. For instance,
provide physical clues; but psychological
clues exist in human genetic memory,
passed down the generations in
rituals, stories and insights,
say, of Siberian sages, or Huichol
Spirit Guides. |
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| Filippos is thus
influenced by both the formal
symbolism of sacred systems, (such
as Pythagorean Geometry or Tantric
mandalas) as much as by personal
dreams and visions, either shamanically
shared, or experienced alone for
instance, staggering awestruck
through the temples of Ankor Wat,
and noticing the kinship of these
faces with those of pre-Colombian
America. He's really, like all
of us of course, just trying to
release his own soul from the
matter at hand. His work, he suggests,
reflects the process in himself
of revisiting the Old Eternal
Truths, finding out what they
really personally mean, and rebirthing
their universal values in the
present. Even his smaller pieces
have a strangely permanent and
megalithic quality about them,
and yet, on closer inspection,
they reveal themselves as monuments
to the transparency of matter. |
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