From the “little house of Drapetsona” to the palace of the “Greek croissant with an island” the house is first of all a refuge. The four walls and the tile above our heads protect this fragile thing that is life. The house is the familiar space in which the little stories of everyday life take place, the ones that are so common and so special for everyone. And sometimes the house becomes a theater of conflicts where dramas and tragedies are played, it becomes a place where violence is secretly or openly sponsored, from a shelter it turns into a hell and a prison. On the walls of the house are imprinted the memories of joys and mourning, welcomes and separations, births and deaths, all that form the stratigraphy of human life.
But everyone wants a house, and many paint a house or life inside the house. Although our ethnographic scenes go back to the 17th century and Baroque painting, from the 19th century the depiction of the familiar space shows the emphasis on the element of subjectivity and self-expression. Both the biedermeier academic painters and the intimistes of post-impressionism present the house as the place where the bourgeois’s private life develops: a shell for the protection of family life, an ark of the owner’s valuables, a nest for sexual encounters, a place for peace. and women. The latter are the ones who have the ability to make the house their “kingdom”, since the public space is controlled exclusively by the male presence. In the 20th century, things may change on a social and artistic level, but the iconography of intimacy survives, insisting on projecting the essential relationship of man with his personal space.
If art reflects elements from the historical reality of an era, modern Greek reality gives the opportunity to enrich the iconography about the house: the house-burden, the bitter redemption of a hellish dream, the search for security that proved to be a trap. The shelter is in danger.
Zoi Godosi Dr. Art History
