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DIMITRIS PIKIONIS

The exhibition of the sculptress Natalia Konstantinidi-Mela

IT WAS WHEN THE SCULPTRESS began to work on marble figures in relief that she portrayed the guerilla fighters of 1821 in all the glory of their youth and courage. This became a persistent theme that she kept working on throughout her entire working life in her search for a higher level of expression. The extent to which this ideal form matured within her is evident in the work in her last exhibition, in her series of the 'pallekari' [the handsome, brave young men], which I go on to discuss below (...)

In this exhibition Natalia Konstantinidi-Mela presents us with two kinds of exhibits. There are those works which portray that precious theme that nestles deep in her soul, and that will appear and continue to reappear in the future: I mean the timeless Greek symbol, the 'pallekari'.

The other works are abstract forms made up of objects from the ongoing needs of our earthly lives, all made from copper, taken from all the ages of man, from the time of the lame god, Hephaestus, up to now and until the end of our days.

And there is also something else, free interpretations, intense but rightfully changing from one form to another, which are, for other reasons, in accordance with the eternal laws of the world. Laws that, as Goethe said, we would not be able to recognize except for the feelings of beauty, which God has planted in us.

I do not want to get bogged down in the dialectical discussions that are so much the fashion these days, the discussions that, the wise Goethe, condemned in his day, said, do not achieve anything but just waste our time...

«I», he said, «prefer to emulate nature - nature which creates forms». I would not want a sense of moderation to be extended into a scrutinisation of these things, which should be self-evident, if we have a little imagination, rather than be pointlessly dogmatic. I hate to think of the exaggerated position these useless things have taken up in our minds. Besides, we are all accountable for something infinitely more important: our unpaid debt to our fellow man, settling our moral debts to the Creator.

But let us stand for a while now, before the supreme representation of Greek youth. Here, upright, is the 'pallekari' in the stance he took when he first appeared, while the others - all horizontal - appear stretched out across a flower - strewn battlefield. Here the intensity of expression has gone beyond Mela's earlier works on the same theme. Do the results of the sculptor's new interpretation of her subject matter coincide with her maturity of mind and spirit?;

All these heroes are characterized by great depth of expression, heated passion! And those heroic bodies that are stretched out in the field, in the horizontal planes? My mind rakes me back to an afternoon in 1912. My battalion, reaching the site of the battle of Lazaraton moments after the battle had finished, was faced with a battlefield strewn with bodies in Greek uniform, that uniform of the King's Guard (it seemed the quartermaster didn't have enough of. the khaki uniforms left). My God, they seemed so beautiful, «the boundless peace of death» in their faces, as beautiful as archangels... and with their decorated sleeves for wings. In the same way, the heroes of Natalia Konstantinidi are beautiful, worked with vision and daring.

Excerpt (Zygos review, February-March ’63, issue 87-88)

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