ART ISLANDS:Spetses-Nikos Mantas
Spetses Island has a rich tradition in art since many important Greek and Foreign artists were inspired by the island whilst living on it, contributing to its spiritual and cultural development. The Ecclesiastical Museum of Spetses, that is housed at the Monastery of Agios Nikolaos, with the help of the truly charismatic and Avant-Garde young priest Grigorios and the very important Greek artist Leda Papakonstantinou, opens its gates to Contemporary art with the exhibition “Nikos Mantas. The Naïve Painter”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Argiri Bezati Archive
The exhibition “Nikos Mantas. The Naïve Painter” is the beginning of a series of Cultural Events that will follow in the near future, as well as the beginning of a Cultural Route with important events on the island that the first Greek woman painter, Eleni Boukouri Altamoura (1821-1900), was born. The naïve painter Nikos Mantas, was born in Spetses in 1921, he went to school until the third grade of primary school and then his father introduced him to the art of construction but he was an unsettling and creative spirit at the same time, drawing from a very young age. With his great love, painting, he systematically engaged after 1982, when he retired. Noteworthy is that during the last decade of his working life he was a conservator of the buildings of the Anargyreos and Korgialeneios School of Spetses. There the artistic vein that penetrated hiμ found expression fueled from the same subsoil from which predate naive painters like Douanier Rousseau or the Greeks Panagiotis Zographos and Theophilos Hatzimihail, draw inspiration. In parallel Nikos Mantas was playing violin at feasts and festivals. As Andreas Helmis says “The works of Nikos Mantis are usually painted in plywood, which were cut and primed assiduously. Using oil paints he depicted on the wooden surfaces, usually on a small scale, his favorite subjects, as they were recorded with absolute accuracy in his mind: landscapes of the island, neighborhoods with a chapel or other characteristic building, horse-drawn carriages, donkeys, boats, caiques and, less frequent, fights and freedom fighter from the Greek War of Independence (1821-30), in his larger compositions he created multi-faceted wedding scenes, that he “knew well” because he participated in the wedding celebrations as violinist. According to the “rules” of Naïve Painting the perspective, whether is absent from his work or is elementary, while the color has fair treatment in all the parts of the painting without pitching and shading. Having found his artistic path alone, he creates a whole world bright and colorful, as Nikos Mantas said “it becomes reality through my imagination”. The exhibition is a tribute to a naïve painter, who loved and served art mentally and physically, as the night of the 80’s and 90’s, he and his wife Matina, presented his works in the old post of Spetses, creating their own open air Gallery and explained enthusiastically to passersby, both locals and tourists the history and technique of the artworks, in an attempt to understand the work they would buy, but also to love it as much as he did.
Info: Curator: Leda Papakonstantinou, Ecclesiastical Museum of Spetses, Monastery of Agios Nikolaos, Old Port, Spetses, Duration: 3/8-15/9/18, Days & Hours: Daily: 18:00-21:00
