Interview in “K” Magazine Kathimerini, Greece

Philip Tsiaras puts the Dot in Pop Art

by Sakis Ioannidis | “K” Magazine Kathimerini, Jan 2020

*( The original article in Greek can be found here )

Philip Tsiaras at his studio

Maria Callas-Jackie Onassis

Carl Lagerfeld

Queen Elizabeth

An aroma of ginger lingers in the air of his apartment in the Financial District, near Ground Zero. Philip Tsiaras was in the kitchen preparing one of his famous recipes when he greeted me at his home in New York; a white loft that looks more like a small gallery, full of his own works and paintings by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.

It was about ten years since our last meeting. Tsiaras was invited by the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography for a major retrospective exhibition of his photographic works entitled, “Supereal”.  I remember seeing for the first time the black and white photos of the “Family Album”, with his slender, half-naked, tanned body, posing as a modern Discobulus with his parents, aunts and uncles surrounding him. “I think there is Hellenism in all of my work.” he says, as he adds some truffle to his recipe.

Smiling and in charming mood, dressed in a black shirt with rolled up sleeves and matching colored moccasins, he opens a bottle of white wine. “I really believe that there is nothing more ‘Greek’ in spirit than that ‘Family Album’ of mine. Unlike other artists, who deny their ethnicity or want to hide their origins, I believe that being Greek is a force. Our cultural history is immense, we carry it on our shoulders either as a weight or as wings, depending on how you feel about it. ”

Putin and Trump

Trump and Putin embrace

Before we sit down at the table, Philip Tsiaras is walking me through his new work, which he regards as is his most “American”. This is a series of portraits, the so-called “Dot Pop Portraits”, which were exhibited a few months ago at his solo exhibition in New York City at the HG Contemporary Gallery. They depict celebrities, from Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas to Steve Jobs, Lucas Samaras and, of course, Donald Trump, who is painted with Vladimir Putin in a Siamese horizontal embrace. “If I were to put one above the other vertically, the portrait would have an obvious political interpretation, says Tsiaras. Now you are encouraged to make up your own mind– they are Duets.”
There are other complex duets, such as Maria Callas combined with Jackie Onassis, and if these combinations seem bold, consider that the whole project started with an interest in dictators. “I first thought about making portraits of some of the most terrifying people in the world, and I started with Mao,” says Tsiaras, sipping from a glass of wine. He then went on to Stalin, but when he arrived at Hitler, something broke inside him. “I was absorbed in a negative world and wondering why I would deify those who had killed so many. So, I decided to make portraits of people who had complex, but also positive lives. ”

Exchanges and Experiments
Tsiaras’ journey in the art world, has its own complexity as well. Born in 1952 in New Hampshire, his father an exiled partisan and young captain of Aris Velouhiotis, as he says of his Father “A leftist in his mind”, but capitalist in his heart.”
Tsiaras studied Comparative Literature and Music at Amherst College and was a classmate and friend of both Antonis Samaras and George Papandreou. He entered art through eyes of poetry, translating Karyotakis and Ritsos, and even won an award for his own writing from The American Academy of Poetry. Concurrent with writing, his early photography paved the way for the construction of his image making process.
In New York, Philip apprenticed alongside Lucas Samaras, with whom he maintains a strong friendship, despite the “pounding” he recalls receiving from his difficult mentor, while searching for his personal path. At this time Pop Art and Andy Warhol were in full bloom.
This leads me to ask Tsiaras about his portraits and the Warhol’s influence on him.
“For the last ten or fifteen years I’ve been collecting artwork myself and I have many Warhol paintings, like Mao’s series of portraits. I have been living with these popular icons for quite some time. On the other hand, the use of the Dot, was an important element for me. I used it for punctuating space in my work, and naturally it weaved itself into the portraits. Samaras also used the dot, as do other artists, so I combined these two influences, and immersed into these portraits the Dot, as the ancient Greeks and Romans might have made mosaics. The portraits are made up of millions of tiny hand-painted dots,” he notes and tells me that he plans to exhibit them in Greece and Spain.
I was wondering to ask Tsiaras how Hellenism comes into play, but before I can say it, Tsiaras begins to explain to me that the new work begins with a digital format that includes particles from his other works. In other words, it is as if the portraits are “born” of the artist’s earlier work. “Three decades ago, and for years I experimented in the darkroom with the black and white portrait. In our modern time, and with the help of technology, I’m trying to make a new interpretation of a traditional thing, a modern portrait,” he says.
New visual languages, experiments, the altered use of mediums and style, are not alien to the Greek American artist. In the course of his career, besides photography, he also engaged in making ceramics, sculptures of blown glass, bronzes, painting and printmaking. Some of this experimentation, he says, is due to his collaboration with Samaras, but also with the time of his generation.
“In the early ’80s, some emerging artists were known to use a variety of mixed media, and styles. “I myself was not trapped by the stereotype of academic art training, so I took the freedom to interpret the making of art in my own way. If you asked me to design a door, I would find a way to make it interesting. It was not the material that mattered, it was leaving your personal mark on that door that was everything.”

Steve Jobs

Contemporary art and corruption
Sitting, with his paintings around us, I ask him about his view on the contemporary art scene, as an artist, collector, and art consultant.  Who decides what art is? “The art gallery, the Market, has a major impact on museums these days”, he responds categorically, adding that “it’s a corrupt system, so artists can only exist if they are part of this material, financial hierarchy. This is not good”.
In 1981, Tsiaras participated in a group exhibition with about fifty artists, including Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat. He remembers it because the New York Metropolitan Museum director came and bought his own work out of the many. “In the past, museum curators themselves would go out and find the next new art work to add to their personal collecting experience. Now they go to the main galleries primarily to see what’s in the market. The directors of museums of contemporary art today are scared to make their own choices. Rather than create their own collections, they go to and consult the big galleries or even worse, the auction houses to “be sure”, and that’s a problem”, he notes.
I ask him about Greece, which he first visited in 1977 with a scholarship. Then he met the Bernier / Eliades gallery, which organized his first exhibition in Athens, while empresario Alexander Iolas had an important, launching party in his honor. Since then he has made the transatlantic trip to Greece very often. He will always be sure to visit his favorite neighborhood, Kolonaki, and stays current with Greek news.
“I believe Greece needs stability, a business-friendly government, and this can only be done with lighter taxation. If taxes are reasonable, then everyone pays and do not bother to steal. I think this new government has given people living abroad a sense that Greece’s economy is stabilizing, the mood is definitely better”.  In any case he does not hesitate to invest himself, and with his partners he is preparing luxury Art Villas in Lefkada. His most Pop works, such as the Dot portraits and older Parthenon Pop images, will be housed in a refurbished neoclassical mansion, a new downtown Hotel, Athens 1896.
And what about his clasmates, the former prime ministers? “I think they need to leave politics aside and impart their political experience and knowledge through lectures at universities. To talk about their successes and failures is important, and people need to hear that.  If they can admit it … “■
Magazine “K”

*( The original article in Greek can be found here )