Alekos Kyrarinis

Vigilant Heart

July 27, 2013 - September 9, 2013

Poros

Virvili Square
18020 Poros Island
Greece

(+30) 697 9989 684

Opening Hours
Mon-Sun:
11.00-13.00 &19.00-23.00

Αlekos Kyrarinis was born in 1976 in Athens and raised on the island of Tinos, the place of his origin. He worked with his father, Yiannis Kyrarins, a sculptor in marble, from the age of eleven until 1997, when he was admitted to the Athens School of Fine Arts. At the School, he studied in the studios of Dimitris Mytaras and Jannis Psychopedis and graduated in 2003.

With a palimpsestic artistic style, with personal meanings and collective memories, Alekos Kyrarinis deals with a complex, strictly personal quest. The “dragon”, symbol of evil, dominates in his artistic language. From classical Greek mythology, dragons have frightened, threatened, and destroyed until they meet up with the redeemer, the liberator in the form of a hero, a bold man, a saint. The dragon is an allusion to ancient mythical beasts, the Medusa and the Lernaean Hydra; but also to the serpent of the original sin, the dragon-slaying Byzantine saints, the winged reptile-temptation of the hermit holy men and monks, the “accursed serpent” of Karaghiozis, the dragon of folk songs and tales.

“Vigilant Heart”, a wish, a prayer and an objective, is the achievement of the struggle against evil, cunning and wickedness. Faith, Orthodoxy, as a living experience, appears through recognisable symbols, all of them the product of experience, both spiritual and fleshly. The senses come alive with the iconography, the chants, the candles and frankincense, Holy Communion and the antidoron. The dragon is exiled through faith, virtue prevails, the soul becomes calm, the heart “becomes vigilant”.