ART Pathos ∙ Τέχνης συγκίνησις

Ελληνικά → Ωδή στην Τελευταία Συνάντηση

With some works, you feel that you can follow their narrative relatively easily. There are others, however, that the more you come to know them, the more they resist a definitive interpretation. For me, Ode to the Last Meeting belongs to the second category. It is a painting I have seen countless times and which, despite my familiarity with it, continues to give me the sense that something remains hidden within its darkness.

The first impression is almost nocturnal. A place without a clear geography, a dense and undefined setting where nature, stone, vegetation and darkness seem to merge. We do not know exactly where we are. And perhaps it does not matter. The setting is not the backdrop to a story, but part of the story itself.

Within this dark world, the human figures gather. At the centre, a young girl kneels with her back to the viewer, wrapped in a deep red garment. Facing her, an elderly man with white hair and beard, his eyes lowered, bends towards her and touches her. A little further back, another man watches pensively, his hand resting on his chin. In front of him, a naked child holds a slender pole with a small red flag. Above, a white bird crosses the darkness. On the other side, almost concealed within the vegetation, a snake lies in wait.

Nothing seems accidental. And yet nothing is clearly explained.

Looking at the composition, I often think that Ioannidis is not only a great painter, but also a remarkable director of his pictorial compositions. The figures, the distances between them, the gestures, the gazes, even what takes place at the edges of the painting, are arranged in such a way that the eye moves through the image and the tension passes from one presence to another. Like a scene staged with absolute precision, yet without revealing its script.

I know the starting point of this composition. It lies in a painting that Ioannidis loved and studied for years, Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. This is not a passing reference. Rembrandt’s painting was the subject of long study and profound admiration for Ioannidis. In Ode to the Last Meeting, this relationship becomes particularly perceptible.

Not, however, as imitation.

That is perhaps what is most interesting. What remains from Rembrandt is something deeper than form. What remains is the memory of a gesture. An elderly man bends towards a kneeling figure and touches her. Around them, the others are silent. The drama is not expressed through cries or theatrical gestures. It is concentrated in the touch.

In The Return of the Prodigal Son, this gesture is one of the most moving in the history of painting. The father’s hands rest upon the son, and almost the entire painting seems to converge there. In Ioannidis, the gesture is transformed. The elderly man is not welcoming someone who has returned. He seems, rather, to be handing something over.

And here the image becomes very personal for me.

The elderly man bears the features of the painter himself. The kneeling young girl is his daughter, as he saw her at a younger age. Knowing this could easily lead to a simple family reading of the work. I think, however, that this would do it an injustice. Because what is taking place between them seems to go far beyond a family moment.

Whenever I look at the elderly man’s hand upon her, I think of transmission. Of knowledge passing from one person to another. Experience. Sensitivity. The need to create. Perhaps even that indefinable gift whose origin no one can quite explain and which cannot be transmitted through words.

Today, it is difficult for me not to see something almost prophetic in this image. Years after the painting was created, that girl followed a path of her own that led once again to creation, to drawing, to architecture, to a relationship with form and space. I do not mean, of course, that the painting literally predicted the future. But there is something strangely moving in returning to this image today and seeing that the gesture of transmission, which was then a pictorial conception, acquired a real continuity over the years.

Perhaps this is why I am so moved by the figure of the painter as well, with his eyes lowered.

He does not see the future. And yet, it is as though he has already sensed something of it.

And this thought brings me to the title. Ode to the Last Meeting. The word “ode” immediately distances the work from a simple narrative. It does not tell us what this last meeting is, nor why it is the last. It leaves us before something that resembles a farewell, yet at the same time a beginning. Something is ending and something is being handed over.

Perhaps this is why the child with the red flag is so important.

He is a strange presence. Naked, almost outside any specific time, he holds a flag, a symbol that belongs above all to history, to collective action, to the idea of struggle. The red of the small flag enters into a dialogue with the large red garment of the kneeling girl. The eye inevitably moves from one red surface to the other.

I have always felt him to be a kind of young forerunner. A child who has not yet entered the world and yet already carries the sign of a claim. Perhaps of hope for a different world. Perhaps of the enduring human need to believe that what is to come can be better than what has been inherited.

Behind him, however, stands the pensive man.

He does not take part in the central gesture. He observes. The hand against his face sets him psychologically apart from the others. I see him as someone looking towards the future without certainty, with concern. If the child carries within him the impulse towards a better world, this man seems to know how difficult that path is. Hope and doubt coexist within the same small group.

And above them all is the white bird.

In a composition dominated by blacks, earth tones and deep reds, its whiteness takes on almost the force of an event of light. It comes out of the darkness. For me, it is difficult not to associate it with hope. Not with an easy, optimistic promise, however. It is a fragile, moving hope, something passing above a dark and wounded world.

On the opposite side is the snake.

It does not dominate. It does not need to. It remains within the vegetation, almost hidden, and precisely for that reason its presence becomes even more unsettling. Evil does not always appear head-on. It can wait. It can exist at the edge of the image and at the edge of human life.

The white bird and the snake do not appear here as incidental naturalistic elements. They belong to a personal symbolic vocabulary that recurs in Ioannidis’s painting. And yet I believe it would be a mistake to turn them into a code in which every symbol has one and only one translation. The bird may be hope, but for another viewer it may be the soul, freedom, departure or return. The snake carries centuries of cultural symbolism, far more than any caption could contain.

This, after all, is something that deeply characterises Ioannidis’s attitude towards his works. He does not want to explain them. He does not want to take away from the viewer the right to stand alone before the image, to wonder, to make connections, to remember, to reflect, even to misinterpret. Because from the moment the creator says, “this means this,” part of the work’s freedom has already been lost.

Perhaps this is why I, too, prefer to write about this painting as a reflection rather than an interpretation.

There are, however, also pictorial memories that I cannot ignore.

First, Rembrandt, unquestionably. Not only because I know that The Return of the Prodigal Son was the starting point for the composition, but because his presence can be felt even without that knowledge. The darkness that is not simply an absence of light but a psychological space. The concentration of the drama in a few figures. The silence. The gesture. The power of red within a restrained chromatic range. The sense that the most important thing in the painting is not what is happening, but what is being transmitted from one human being to another.

Looking more closely at the painted surface, however, I also think of late Titian. Of that moment in Venetian painting when the figure begins almost to dissolve into the very substance of the paint. In his late Pietà, the figures emerge from the darkness as though born from the very substance of the painting. The brushstroke moves beyond its descriptive function and becomes trace, erosion, light, memory.

I sense something similar across large areas of the Ode. The human figures remain recognisable and corporeal, but the world around them begins to dissolve. Stones, plants, earth, walls, sky do not everywhere have clear boundaries. They become surface. They become matter. In certain passages, if one forgets the representation for a moment, one finds oneself almost before an abstract painting.

And then there is Giorgione.

The Tempest comes to mind not because I see any direct transfer of its composition, but for another reason. For the mystery. For that strange certainty that something is happening before us while, at the same time, we cannot say with certainty what it is. People, a child, nature, ruins, sky, signs and symbols coexist within an image that seems to possess a narrative yet refuses to give us its entire story.

I consider this element very important in Ode to the Last Meeting as well.

The painting has a story, but it is not an illustration of a story.

It has symbols, but it is not a riddle awaiting a single correct solution.

It contains real people, but it is not a family portrait.

It contains references to the painting of the past, but it is not an exercise in the Old Masters.

And perhaps this is precisely where its essence lies.

Ioannidis engages in a dialogue with a painting tradition he knows deeply, but he does not attempt to return to it. He draws from it ways of speaking about things that continue to concern us. Transmission from one generation to the next. Knowledge and responsibility. Fear of the future. The presence of evil. The need for hope. The desire for a better world. And ultimately, the human struggle with time.

Perhaps this is why today I even see the ages of the figures differently. An elderly man, an adult observer, a young girl and a child. As though different moments of human life had been gathered within a few square metres. The one who has already travelled the road. The one who receives. The one who wonders. The one who is about to begin.

And between them, a gesture.

The more I look at the work, the more I believe that this gesture is its true centre. Not the bird, not the snake, not even the red flag. The elderly man’s hand upon the younger figure.

A hand that does not hold.

It touches.

And perhaps it hands something over. Or rather, transmits.

What exactly it transmits, the painter does not tell us. Perhaps knowledge. Perhaps memory. Perhaps the gift of creation. Perhaps a responsibility. Perhaps none of these things for another viewer.

And that is how it should remain.

For Ode to the Last Meeting may have a deeply personal starting point, but from the moment it was completed, it ceased to belong exclusively to the personal history of those who know its figures and symbols. The viewer who knows none of these things has the right to create a story of their own.

Perhaps this is, ultimately, the work’s greatest strength. Although it was born from specific memories, specific people and a profound dialogue with the painting of the past, it remains open.

And each time we look at it, the last meeting can take place again. For this is perhaps one of the rare qualities of the great works in the history of art: to belong to the time that gave birth to them and, at the same time, to be able to transcend it, giving rise to new thoughts, new emotions and new readings in every age.