Georgios Tzortzoglou artist (Szentendre, 2000)

Georgios Tzortoglou, as his name indicates, is a Greek-hom Hungarian artist. It is a consequence of the European political environment at the end of the forties and beginning of the fifties that the descendant of Greek parents and Greek ancestors from Asia Minor is eventually brought up in a Hungarian environment, and begins to organize a pop band, inspired by Hungarian and Greek folk music, accompanying the poems of Hungarian poets, in his adolescence (an important musician who is still successful today, the lead singer of the band Barbaro creating sensitive music with spedal sounds). He studies a number of different things, a young man open to the world, when he discovers his talent for the fine arts. This double identity - his ties to Greek and Hungarian culture, the knowledge of two different kinds of visuality, the possession of the Central European and Mediterranean pictorial language have resulted in the creation of paintings and prints offering a special aesthetic pleasure. Yorgos is a non-contemporary painter, or to be more precise, his being contemporary lies in his not being up-to-date. He did not join any of the fashionable trends, he does not follow any of the current American or Western European directions, but his painting feeds on the inner experience which is represented and carried by the Greek and Hungarian environments for him. Where he first starts out: it is the city, the sight of the walls. The wall surfaces of the buildings which have been around for centuries or decades, the impressions of time, history and people on them. On the one hand, Knossos, the thread of Ariadne, the travels of Ulysses, the labynnths: the past, the ancient beginning, reference to the secret, mysterious myths preserved in the memory of mankind on the pretence and with the aid of lines and figures. On the other hand, on the at least equally secret, mysterious and spedal Greek islands the tiny little settlements barely touched by civilization, blinding white and blue house walls, the planes reflecting the strong sunlight, the long shades, the cracks and webs of lines recalling the indecipherable messages of children and andent cultures, the winding lines arranged into figures; all these make the traveller potter about on the hot stones with his heart in his mouth, and always long to go back to the indescribably simple and complicated Mediterranean small town walls. Thirdly, that intangible beauty about which some of the American and Western European aesthetes would like to believe that it is obsolete and does not even exist in the century of mass

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