A Man of Sorrows
My work as a whole is traversed and possessed by the sense of Disease and Suffering Human. In the iconography of Byzantine art I am emotionally triggered and ultimately artistically stimulated by the themes that concern the Human and his passion. I feel that this concept is expressed in the clearest way in the scenes of the Crucifixion, the Deposition and most of all, the Man of Sorrows. This iconographic type inspired by the events of the Deposition, the Lamentation and the Entombment has no narrative elements and therefore is the most dramatic one. It shows the dead Christ in bust, but upright, with the head tilted slightly to the right and this is the only scene in which Christ is depicted with His eyes closed. Despite the oddity of the upright posture, the fact that Christ is dead is obvious, both because of His closed eyes and by the unnatural position of His body. Behind Him, is usually visible part of the vertical arm of the Cross with the Plate with the inscription King of Glory, according to the Byzantine abbreviation of the inscription, ΟΒCΔΤΔΞ.
In my project (A Man of Sorrows) I work with shades of white, in grayscale. I used a wooden image of the Man of Sorrows whose chromatic and tonal intensityI minimized and turned into a kind of a spake background. On this background I depicted the sexless Human, constant symbol in my work, in the characteristic pose of the dead Christ, giving him meaning with words from his medical history and providing a counterpart of Christ’s plate.