Hic Rhodus

Nearly a century after the founding of ICAROS Rhodes ceramics factory, the exhibition Hic Rhodus is presented in the place where it all began, paying tribute to the owners of Ikaros, Kostas and Phaedra Chatzikostantis, as well as to all those who worked at Icaros and contributed to the creation of this exceptional cultural heritage, now preserved in collections and museums in Greece and abroad. Fourteen artists draw inspiration from the ceramics of the renowned Ikaros Rhodes factory to create contemporary works of art that question and re examine the very notion of tradition. IKAROS Rhodes I.C.A.RO. ceramics factory was founded in Rhodes by the Italians in 1928. It survived the Second World War and, following the liberation and incorporation of the Dodecanese into Greece, was acquired in 1947 by the Rhodian entrepreneur K. D. Chatzikostantis, taking the name Ikaros. Taking advantage of the island’s growing development, its new owner transformed it into the second-largest ceramics factory in Greece, after Kerameikos in Athens. Over the course of its operation, IKAROS employed more than 400 people, including several important artists, among them Spyros Oikonomidis, a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and an exceptionally gifted draughtsman and sculptor, despite having lost his left arm in an accident at the age of five. Oikonomidis became the first artistic director of the factory’s Greek period. He was later succeeded by Dimitris Davis, a painter and engraver who had studied at the Munich Academy. The contribution of Memetis, with his secret glazing formula, as well as that of many other artists and collaborators, was equally significant. Thanks to the innovations and techniques developed there — such as working in relief directly onto the surface of fresh clay — Ikaros ceramics have endured through time without losing their distinctive character and continue to fascinate collectors around the world. In 1985, Ikaros received the International Quality Award in Madrid. The factory abruptly ceased operations on 14 June 1987, when Kostas Chatzikostantis and his wife Phaedra lost their lives in a car accident. According to the exhibition’s curator, Apostolis Artinos, the exhibition Hic Rhodus unfolds within this realm of emotion. It attempts to trace signs lost and found again, signals from a world in retreat. Ikaros is a relatively recent story, and yet it is already a story that has been lost. Its immutable world bears witness to something, while at the same time leaving something else to its silence. The artists in the exhibition are invited, in turn, within the aesthetic environment of their own time, to take up this very experience of recollection: to summon within their work the memory of the object and to confront its allure. Their work is not dictated by a formalist approach, but by the transparency of a decorative language that unfolds its signs: its floral ornamentation, the mythical saz leaf, the little sailing boats, the deer and the birds. An established aesthetic world that, in each new moment, brings its own truth into being. In Leonie Yagdjoglou’s “In Reverse”, the decorative surface of an Ikaros plate is transferred onto the tablecloth of an old round table, at the centre of which stands an undecorated vase. The decorative language abandons its ceramic surface and enters the intimacy of a festive gathering — the Sunday table. In Apostolos Karakatsanis’s “Greed Ι”, the wind itself takes form: the wind that fills the sails of Icaros’s little boats. Its breaths become voyages, form and repetition. In Natalia Manta’s :Death on a deer” a large-scale plate is painted with motifs drawn from Icaros alongside the artist’s own symbolic and dreamlike figures — worlds in which the emotion of tradition and personal emotion merge into one another. The Ikaros deer, one of the factory’s most characteristic decorative motifs, inspires several artists in the exhibition. Since antiquity, the deer has symbolised the human soul: the sacred quality of its gaze, its silence, its stillness. “Spring is Back Again”, a small porcelain deer by Kyriaki Mavrogeorgi, stands within a floral environment of hydrangeas; it becomes part of them, the body that awakens them. Another deer, in a ceramic composition by Vasilis Zografos, retains all the grace and lightness of its decorative origins, yet here assumes uncanny overtones, without losing anything of the destiny inscribed in its documented provenance: it was once a commercial ornament. The mythical Icarus, who gave his name to the ceramics factory, bears a deer’s head on the plates of Dionisis Christofilogiannis — an image that further intensifies his mythical origin. Along the rims of the plates, a garland of baked dough evokes the warmth of origins and the familiar trace of the humble people who worked at Icaros. An Ikaros fish-shaped salt cellar becomes the point of departure for Ioanna Gouma’s work: her little fish leaves behind the truth of its utilitarian function to assume a commanding presence within her ceramic reef. In her vase entitled “Lafina”, Ioanna Hatzipanigyri depicts two female hands framing a floral environment, a reference to the women who worked at Icaros and were required to decorate dozens of ceramic pieces each day, at great speed, before they could be released onto the market. A dramaturgical composition emerges in the two vases by Stella Kapezanou. “In Rodhian Night”, hybrid creatures of the imagination run wild beneath the vault of their own Walpurgis Night, while in “Icarian Sea” we encounter the Ikaros boat, its storm-tossed voyages and the familiar yet picturesque archipelago, with its little flags and an octopus drying beneath the sun. Ikaros was defined by its decoration far more than by its forms. This is also the focus of Konstantinos Ladianos’s work, in which the entire decorative repertoire of Ikaros can be recognised across his bird-shaped ceramic sculpture: tulips, waves and a little boat seal its body. In his sculptural work “Dwarf Bather”, Dimitris Fragakis depicts a dwarf in the pose of the Colossus of Rhodes — an emblematic Rhodian figure that, curiously, was absent from the decorative repertoire of Ikaros. In this grotesque stance, the Colossus borrows something from the ceramic tradition of Ikaros: the turquoise of its waves, their iridescence, finding there its own singular transparency. The works of Olga Vlassi and Maro Michalakakos are compositions made from ceramic tiles bearing characteristic Ikaros designs. In Vlassi’s work, the floral ornaments have lost the intensity of their colour, but not their graphic identity. In Michalakakos’s composition, fragments of the bird motifs found on Ikaros tiles can be discerned — more precisely, beaks and birds’ feet with curved talons — motifs that also constitute a recurring reference in Michalakakos’s own visual language. Finally, in the work of Giorgos Tserionis, one of his characteristic vases finds, along its rim and extremities, the signs through which it connects with the tradition of Ikaros: a floral garland around the lip and tulip stems emerging from its body evoke the enduring resilience of these images, which have inhabited these shores of the Aegean for centuries