Capten’s dark humour overflows with love; it is love. Nakedness, albeit seductive, appears decently clothed. In his works, the colour combinations of erotic desire, the palette of the libido, may seem to be flirting with kitsch when they are in fact toying with the sacré, with the sacred. Capten is a master deceiver, that’s his game, and he takes it seriously. The significant, the essential, the crucial, is introduced through the back door. He admonishes much like a virtuoso prankster, without being noticed. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's funny, it's fun, and it's dead serious.
Two novels rendered in images: A diptych: 1. The medieval story of Lady Godiva, who fearlessly galloped naked through the streets of Coventry, leading to a liberating reduction of taxes in the area, converses, in Capten’s work – where the legendary Peeping Tom, the tailor who saw Godiva naked and whose name has become synonymous with voyeurism, is transformed into a dance number of oculi – with the myth of The Rape of Europa, and with Artemis, goddess of the hunt, protector of children and animals, and goddess of the moon. And: 2. A subversive, contemporary retelling of Jonah, with a giant fish, a mackerel/cetacean, swallowing a voluptuous/ideal couple in love.
Amidst the lockdowns and the quarantine, Capten found recourse in History and Myth, and wisely so. He feigns irreverence, when in fact his piety is exemplary. A chanter of piety, for the first panel of the diptych he uses church banners and vestments, or epigonatia (considered also as spiritual swords). For the second panel, he creates sculptures and painted collages on blue and pink velvet. The libido firmly resists the bleakness of confinement with a celebratory post-pop orgasm of imagination and with persistent/painstaking artistic production. The artworks are delicate and crafted with finesse and painful, stubborn exertion. They are fragments of miracles constituting a stained-glass window on which the flickering light is diffused, while his figures, especially in the second diptych, bring to mind Chagall’s floating dancing people. In Capten’s work, figures are seen dancing on water instead, reminding us of Pentzikis' reflections on the sea and the sky.
George-Icaros Babassakis
Kypseli, 08.03.2023
Translated by Yota Dimitriou
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