by emmanuel cooper

‘All you need is your own imagination So use it that's what it's for

Go inside, for your finest inspiration Your dreams will open the door’

Vogue, Madonna

Written by Madonna and Shep Pettibone

Reconfiguring familiar images has long been a challenge for artists. Andy Warhol turned major figures of the sixties and seventies, such as Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao, into transformed but instantly recognisable images through simplifying and enhancing their appearance. For George Papadopoulos it is the powerful image of the Madonna that, as a child, he found mesmerising and one that has continued to hold his imagination.

As a child, during his visits to Orthodox Churches in his native Cyprus, he was surrounded by images of the Madonna, a popular devotional subject across Central Europe for over 600 years. He gazed at it within the aura of solemn ritual, richly decorated vestments, flickering candles, pungent incense and a powerful sense of theatre. Reassuring, reliable and comforting, Papadopoulos found the steady, modest and retiring gaze a welcome signs of security in a rapidly changing world.

At the same time he was also aware of the inflexibility of such devotion, of the attempt by the church and other institutions to keep things as they were. Such ideas resurfaced six years ago when he spent time in the all male atmosphere of one of the monasteries in Mount Athos in northern Greece. Here the strict routine, the highly directed day and the formal ritual, while offering a purposeful structure, also seemed to Papadopoulos rigid and inflexible in its determination to resist change.

It was with such thoughts in mind that he started to look more systematically and closely at images of the Madonna, whether as prints, paintings or even mosaic. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, not only was the arrangement of figures significant but there were also rules about line and colour. The features of the face were important, noses, for instance, were made thinner and mouths smaller to

emphasize their spiritual nature. With their explicit depiction of the Virgin, icons are in no sense seen as ‘graven images’, but, as the eighth-century Saint John of Damascus observed, ‘open books to remind us of God.’

Undeterred by such a long and well-honed history, Papadopoulos started to investigate how he might make his own representations of the ‘Holy Mother’ in sheet glass. With a combination of questioning and reverence he started to play about with the image, secure in the knowledge that however far he pushed and pulled it – literally shattering the image – it would retain its magic and mystery. Using the basic outline of the familiar Madonna, he assembled the layers before carefully cracking the glass to emphasize form and structure. On some he incorporated prints derived from ancient icons, often enhanced by judicious use of gold leaf, to create multi-layered images that glow with life.

Later works became bolder, freer and more experimental. Through the use of luminescent colours such as reds, yellows and greens he introduced a new awareness of light that illuminates the image of the Madonna as an icon for our time. While acknowledging tradition, Papadopoulos has used the medium of glass to bring a fresh awareness of the idealised image. His series of works are both a meditation on, and also recognition of, the abiding power of a figure that continues to catch the popular imagination – one that remains an inspiration in ‘opening doors’

Emmanuel Cooper is an artist, writer and critic.

ELEA…//…1/

by charles darwent

George Papadopoulos tells a nice story, of eating lunch at Derix Studio, the world’s leading factors of art glass.

There was another artist staying there when I was [says Papadopoulos], an American who was working on a big project for a shopping mall in St. Louis. One day, he came into lunch looking gloomy and said “I’ve had a breakage”.

The other people at the table instantly went glum; and I realised that I was the

only one there who was smiling.

Although Derix is in Germany, this wasn’t schadenfreude. Rather, it’s an indication of how very different Papadopoulos’ practice is from that of most artists working in glass; a difference that raises important questions about the work in this show.

Walk around Derix Studio and you’ll see a good cross-section of art glass of the past 20 years. Everyone from Patrick Heron to Danny Lane has made the pilgrimage to Taunusstein, calling on an expertise the Derix family has built up over five generations. You’ll see all kinds of work in their studio: conservative, oddball, monotone, brightly

coloured. But, pretty well without exception, the artworks at Derix subscribe to the biblical line toed by George Herbert: “A man who looks on glass / On it may stay his eye / Or if he pleaseth through it pass / And then the heaven espy.”

The choice, as Herbert saw it, was to look at glass or to look beyond it: to focus on the surface or to ignore it altogether. That surface may be sandblasted, acid-etched or studded with toy starfish, but it remains, in essence, a surface: a thing to be decorated, painterly. By contrast, the majority of Papadopoulos’ work over the past decade has been sculptural, which is to say, preoccupied with the third dimension that lies between the surfaces of a piece of glass rather than with the surfaces themselves. And it is that visceral difference that led to Papadopoulos’ unwitting lunchtime smile, and to his work standing out from the other glass on the walls of his German factors.

I suppose a measure of its difference is that you might describe Papadopoulos’ work as “muscular”. It’s not a word you associate much with glass. A byword for fragility (and, until recently, for cost), glass in art is treated with a reverence that dates back to Herbert and beyond. Its history as a carrier of religious stories seems bound up with its treatment as a sacred material: a thing to be handled with respect, whose breakage is to be mourned.

By contrast, Papadopoulos often starts by breaking his glass, or by having it broken for him. His 2003 triptych, Impact, had been smashed at Pilkington’s test laboratories by a bag of lead shot, replicating the blow of a head on a windscreen. People who saw the piece tended to remark on its beauty; and then, having read an explanatory wall-text, to recoil. It wasn’t just the unpleasant associations of car smashes that shocked them, but that glass – art glass – could have been treated in this way.

It’s tempting to read Impact as a defining moment in Papadopoulos’ career, bringing together the anticipated accidents of laminated glass with the controlled accident that lies at the heart of his practice. Stained glass – the medium to which Papadopoulos’ work is most often (and most wrongly) consigned – is all about control, meticulousness. A piece like Impact is just the opposite, its cracks being about a way of making that rejoices in the accidental.

If you’re looking for a handy pedigree for Papadopoulos’ work, then you’ll find it in the Process movement of the 1960s: artists like Robert Morris, whose sagging felt pieces celebrated the capriciousness of their material, the freedom to do their own thing. Like Morris’ work, Papadopoulos’ tells the story of its making. It is hard – maybe impossible – to look at objects like the ones in this show without imagining the the crack! of a hammer on glass, the unpredictable (and scary) splintering of shards. And it seems to me that this is as it should be; that works like Miscible and Moriai unlock a thing that most glass artists hide away: that cold (as opposed to hot, or blown) glass was made by fusing silica at 3000° Farenheit; that the resultant compound is inescapably unstable; that glass is an accident waiting to happen.

Like most things in life, there are two ways of dealing with this truth: to deny it, or to enjoy it. Taking the former route produces art that looks polite, crafty. Papadopoulos’ work, by contrast, seems elemental, of a kind with the volcanic processes that produce both glass and the rock from which glass is derived. And it’s that collision of accident and control – of nature and civilization, if you like – that we see in the work in this show.

It’s a collision that we also see in one of the central creation myths of Hellenic (and thus of Western) culture. Athena and her uncle, Poseidon, vying for the patronage of the city of Athens, each offered its citizens a gift. Poseidon, god of the sea, struck the Acropolis with his trident and conjured up a spring of salt water; the more pragmatic Athena countered with the world’s first olive tree. Athenians, sensibly, put themselves under the goddess’ protection, while a peeved Poseidon left his spring to flood the Attic plain. Later, in the Persian Wars, Xerxes’ invading armies burned Athena’s tree, though the olive, undaunted, sprang back to life in the night.

Control and accident, violence and repair: it’s a theme that is central to the olive myth, as it is to Papadopoulos’ glass. In more recent times, it has also been a recurring theme in the history of Cyprus, where the artist was born. A refugee at the age of five, Papadopoulos has occasionally made work that refers directly to the continued division of his birthplace. More generally, though, his work has concerned itself with fission and fusion, the reconciliation of broken fragments; and the work in this show is no exception.

Elea is the Greek for olive, though the word carries an etymological echo its English equivalent lacks: of Elais, the protector of olive trees, who could turn anything she touched to oil. (When Elais was captured by Agamemnon during the Trojan War, Dionysus helped her escape by turning her into a dove: another moment of rescue in the olive story.) Bound up in the four letters of this show’s title is an entire history and mythology, one that is apparently made visible in the olive tree’s contorted shape; a conflation of time and form that caught the eyes of Cézanne, van Gogh and Monet.

What we see when we look at Moriai and Elais, in other words, is not a single history but a number of overlapping ones: material, mythological, artistic, personal. And in the same way, we don’t experience the works as a single thing we can call “abstract” or “representational”, but as a series of possibilities.

Moriai may take its name from the twelve sacred trees of the Athenian Academy, but the piece isn’t a re-enactment of those trees. Rather, as with them, we are left to find our way through the work literally and metaphorically, sensing the violence and repair in its making, the divisions and syntheses in its story. Elais, meanwhile, plays with sacred geometry. Its square-profile columns may read as classical plinths or as a modern cityscape or as both, or neither, of those things. Elais’ columns are concerned with ideas of pure form that goes back to Plato (who taught, in case you had forgotten, in an olive grove). And Miscible finds its history in layering: of tree bark, of old-fashioned photographic plates; of palimpsests, allusions, revelations half-seen.

What makes this work particularly pleasing, I think, is that it comes at a moment when the certainties of Postmodernism are beginning to fade. The idea that facture, making by hand, belongs to a thing called “craft” and that “art” is entirely a child of the intellect, is coming to seem ridiculous. Papadopoulos’ elemental work shows that glass art need not be the prissy thing it often is; that there’s strength in breakage, surety in risk.

Charles Darwent is art critic of The Independent on Sunday.

George Papadopoulos

I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors…’

Walt Whitman

Unlike most sculptures, the glass installations of George Papadopoulos have no interiors or exteriors in any obvious or formal sense, but nevertheless are concerned with inner and outer, whether this be the physical space created, or the ideas and references they embody. Ever since studying interior design, Papadopoulos has been aware of the architectural qualities of space and the possibilities this present for artists in using materials, such as glass, within different environments. As a student at the Royal College of Art he worked with laminated glass, carefully breaking the inner layers into intriguing abstract patterns that recall such phenomena as broken ice and the movement of water, conscious of the transparent qualities of the material. These large sheets, some two metres tall, were carefully mounted and lit to create forms that, paradoxically, combined the idea of the beauty of the fractured line within an ordered assembly so opening up new uses for this seductive material. In his latest work Papadopoulos takes these ideas further, introducing the idea of precisely placed installations using colour, fracture and mirroring as his palette.

Papadopoulos’s theme is the olive, a quintessential symbol of nourishment, hope and optimism, with a history rooted in classical myth and the bible. When the dove, sent out by Noah after spending nearly a year on the ark, returned with an olive branch in its beak, it signalled both the renewal of life and hope for the future. Picasso and other artists captured the olive as a highly evocative symbol of peace. Myths around the olive tree date back to antiquity. The ancient Greeks believed that the cultivated olive, Olea europaea, was purely Greek and that its homeland was Athens. When the gods debated the name of the city, they could not decide whether to give the honour to Athena, goddess of wisdom, or Poseidon, god of the sea, and so each was asked to produce a gift, both useful and beautiful, to benefit humankind. After Poseidon hit a rock with his trident a fantastic horse sprang forth. When Athena then struck the rock with her spear a gigantic olive tree appeared, which so impressed the gods that they judged the tree to be the more important gift and so named the city after her. Such is a flavour of the history that forms the background for Papadopoulos’s exhibition Elea.

For many, the olive, with its slightly bitter, distinctive texture and astringent savour is an acquired flavour, part of the entry into the sophisticated tastes of the adult world. In the central Mediterranean the olive is regarded as an essential part of the diet, an place it has had for centuries. Once, travelling on the of the large, stately ships that ferry people round the Greek islands, I watched a group of gipsies sitting in the bough of the vessel relishing a meal of large black olives and crusty bread splashed with olive oil washed down with wine. The whole scene had a timeless quality in which you could almost see Athena producing the olive tree. On the same holiday, I remember wondering in shady olive groves, the trees proving shelter from the sun, the dappled light falling through the branches adding an element of animation to the experience. The knotted, twisted, convoluted trunks and branches, some leaning perilously to one side, the pale coloured leaves, looking bleached by the sun, all creating an atmospheric sense of history, inviting reflection and contemplation, a place for inner thoughts and retrospection.

The olive figures predominantly in Papadopoulos’s background and his childhood in Cyprus. He felt – and was – at home in his grandfather’s olive grove, where the trees not only symbolised longevity and security, but also yielded delicious olives as well as the dark viscous pale green oil. History, myth and autobiography all form part of Papadopoulos’s three installations, each one of which deals in some way with the olive, a tree that serves as a metaphor for a cultural and personal history that is as rich and savoury at the fruit itself.

Papadopoulos’s large and well-organised studio, housed on an industrial estate in north London, is a modern building, the interior of which, with its ordered sense of purpose, has some of the qualities that recall the peace of the olive grove, an oasis of creativity among the anonymous and bland buildings. Glass panels in the process of being coloured and decorated, which lie tantalisingly on large, cloth-covered tables, are brought to life when held up by Papadopoulos who points out what has still to be done, and, by allowing light to pass through, brings the multi-layered surfaces to surface. Other panels hang on steel cables, a hint of the way they will look in the exhibition. Classical music murmurs in the background, the only sound disturbing the silence.

Among the racks of tools on the wall, their appropriate space outlined with red, hang two reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of olive groves. Painted in the late nineteenth century, the evocative atmospheric images speak, paradoxically, of both peace – suggested by the ancient trees, planted in an ordered sequence hundreds of years earlier – and of restlessness. The gnarled timbers and convoluted branches, twisting here and there, seem to be searching, for ever engaged on an unknown quest. The short, stabbing brush strokes, whirling and turning, together with the saturated colour, add to the sense of movement, suggesting energy, disturbing the atmosphere. Papadopulos’s sculptures, though offering a different experience to this highly evocative tree and its fruit, are equally ambiguous, at once seductive and sharp.

Just as wandering in the olive grove can transport us through centuries, or the taste of the olive whisk us into the sun-drenched heat of the Mediterranean, so Papadopoulos’s visual handling of three-dimensional space, the precise use of line and colour, and above all light, constitute an engaging journey through time and space. Through his use of decorated glass panels, screens or boxes, all carefully lit and assembled into three-dimensional form, Papadopoulos creates mood and ambience. Using sophisticated techniques of working with laminated glass, he explores the use of the material and its ability to be textured, coloured and even cracked while at the same time allowing its transparency to confirm this as a magical material that can at times seem to disappear.

In the installation Olive Grove, a maze-like structure of seven laminated glass screens, each some two metres high, in the way they are assembled, recalls the work of Dan Graham, an artist adept at creating real and illusionary space. For Papadopoulos, it is the reality of the experience, with the viewer interacting with the screens that is central to the enjoyment of the work. Each of the panels consists of laminated glass, the central layers of which have been broken and cracked and stained with sepia coloured inks. The colour and patterning allude to the trunk or central spine of the tree, and the delicate cracks radiating from this seem like leaves caught in the sunlight, an abstract response to the dappled light falling through the branches and leaves. Wander between the screens and we can be transported into another world, one in which the real and the unreal are subtly combined.

With its appearance recalling the patterning of tradiotional Javanese batik, the panels can be seen as crossing continents, making references that are as multi-layered as the process itself. In his installation Plato’s Tree Papadopoulostakes us into different territory, to other sorts of experiences. The title, derived from the tree under which, mythology recounts, was the one the great Philosopher sat to teach, bears little or no resemblance to the tourist attraction now in the Greek capital. Nevertheless, it is an evocative link with ancient history while also reminding us that Plato’s ideas, such as the notion of an eternal order and the importance of idea-based education, not only survive but continue to catch the public imagination. The six panels, each placed one in front of the other in front of a light box mirrored to reflect the others, offer a variety of vista. Suspended on steal cables, the panels themselves are seductive objects that become emblematic of time and place. Each features a collage of different effects, including cracking, sand-blasting and mirroring of the surface. The installation draws us in, catching us in a deep well of history and sensuality.

Sensuality is also one of the themes evoked in Olive Oil, a series of tall, box-like columns in polished steel surmounted by a square glass box. The walls of the glass box have areas coloured a pale olive green, the colour Papadopoulos points out, is that of the oil he brings from Cyprus. Like a mixture of oil and water, the two do not combine, but whirl and eddy around each other, the two fluids of different and incompatible densities. A mirrored base to the box means that as we glaze inside and move around the reflections distort what we see, creating a psychedelic kaleidoscope of colour and patterning. Moving between the boxes is an experience far from the tranquillity of the olive grove. This is a city as opposed to a rural landscape, a built and constructed environment where oil is a commodity, a luxury for some but also a powerful link with warm climates and a touch of history.

Emmanuel Cooper is a potter, writer and critic.