I have been fantasising with the idea of conceiving the Ocean as a public space and an art space. But I never dreamt that someone performed this dream already. There is a movie of the Greek artist Yiannis Maniatakos painting under water that fills the viewer with lots of emotions. When you belong to a coastal community, and such is my case, you grow up with a culture of salt. Salt is both a powerful preserver and assures you food for the winters and a strong corrosive agent that acts against all the materials you use for shelter. In that regard, painting under water embodies not only an embrace of a space of light, life and liquid but a philosophy of mingled bodies and substances that goes far beyond the human. True! We never were bold enough to ask salt if she would like to be part of painting! By painting inside the Ocean, in a spot where light gets through its surface as if it was marvellous glass turning everything light blue, embracing the painter with its liquid body, he is insisting in a new artistic epistemology, one that departs from mingled bodies. A true non-binary exercise that tries—hard and repeatedly— to depict the sea from inside.

From Nicolas Poussin to Constable, Turner, and Cézanne, artists have been approaching nature as a genre, as a subject that animates the matter of painting with the logic of life. Plein air is a term rearing to the act of painting outdoors, to the gesture of taking the practice of art out of the controlled environment of the studio. The sun, the winds, the elements of nature do as they wish and not as the artist desires. Also, the nude bodies can only be imagined or replaced by voluptuous clouds, tempests, all the phenomena and moods of the weather. However, for centuries, no one wondered why is there no portrait of the corals, the fishes... Portraits of different histories, histories of the millions of shipwrecks, the unlucky civilisations that ended in the depths, of the traces of all the vestiges and wrongdoings of the humans towards the Ocean... Yiannis Maniatakos was not so far either in his work. He stayed by porting the familiar environment under the sea that he chose as his own. From there, painting opened up to forms of life and processes that were novel to painting herself. We should see it as a true get togeth- er between one of the most —historically, at least—privileged media and the Ocean. Movement has always been a challenge for art. Accused of depicting life frozen, art and artists have been exploring ways of becoming life, instead of representing it. For this reason, dynamism is a key notion. It refers not to the illusion of movement but to the reality of mutualism. To engage physically, mentally and philosophically in a practice that demands radical adaptations — to breath, to the site, to the sight, to the fact that no one except the fishes can stand still while painting. Adaptation even to your co-workers, the co-habitants of the sea while you paint its wonders. A practice truly based in learning, anew, as a human, to be with others. The same exercise that we perform when, every time humans enforce violence to others, we wonder about why it is so difficult to stay in balance to respect diversity, to honour differences, to keep freedom as the most precious value. Yes. Many times in time, in history, we have needed a refuge. Yiannis Maniatakos found —at least partially—a shelter, a refuge where to re-program the possi- bility of a new world in balance, in peace, respectful to each other. Painting under the Ocean refers to an exile, but refers as well to a promise, the promise to do all we can to keep the conditions of life in all its forms in relation. A move —going under water—that is even more radical if you take into account the deep nostalgic character of the Greek society, obsessively insisting and referring to antiquity, to being the origin of democracy... He does not obviously reject this myth, and yet by leaving this idea of a civilisation, incorporates this tic of collective self-de- piction into a radical new reality that may become a new foundation of Greek identity and philosophy: the sea. A sea that accepts him, Yiannis Maniatakos, that allows for co-creativity and that reminds all of us that the true encyclopaedic goal is synthesis.

This exhibition is composed of a careful selection of his works. Those works, not large in scale, but charged with under water energy, reflect on a simple subject: is there a chance to paint the depths of the seas as we paint the landscapes above Earth? Indeed, painting has been for centuries concerned about the nature of light, can painting capture its transformative and metamorphic magic? Can painting be like light? A substance that touches matter and makes colour possible, radiance a gift? Take, for example, Grave of a Ship. Every Ocean culture is, as well, a culture of shipwreck tales. They embody the tension between the human will to possess the Ocean dominating it from its surface. All marine animals know about our impossibility to breath under water and they fear our reac- tion to it. Feeling in inferiority humans get defensive, aggressive even. Knowing about the depths of the Oceans we also assume they may be filled with treasures, with what is left from other’s disgrace. Grave of a Ship could have been done from the point of view of a sea creature –like Yiannis Maniatakos himself was. A creature that ob- serves this beautiful shadow of a vessel, the remains of a tool created by humans to remain above the surface, now under the seas. What is beautiful and surprising about this whole series of paintings is the invitation to reflect on the colour blue. The colour blue seen from the point of view of water itself, the colour blue seeing by the blue of the Ocean. Apparently, since human eyes are not at all able to see anything without light, under water –still in the thin fringe where light penetrates the surface—we see everything filtered by blue. This series of works are a little of a blue revolution, a blue ode to the eyes that can only see blue, our eyes. You can sense how carefully he depicts the moments where we see the reds on the riffs, the sandy floors... still whitish. The artist, Yiannis, is perfectly aware that a few meters down nothing is but deep dark blue, blue like noir. He is warning us, guiding us into a new life of the senses. See the work Untitled from 2000. It is almost a manifesto, an image that shows us a way. In this work we can clearly see the reflection of the light through the water entering its bottom, even shallow, illumi- nating a path. What path? The way to another life, to another dimension, to another knowledge of life and of the world denied to our senses for which we need more imagination than technology. Undoubtedly the impossibility of inhabiting the bottom of the sea is the most powerful motivation to develop a technology that can make up for our shortcomings. However, what we lack is not so much machines and the almighty desire to possess and have, but the fantasy of understanding the difference between life on land and life in the sea. Here you may notice a detail: the intensity of these works corresponds to a psychological, existential intensity. The works want to portray the intensity of a search, not only the search for the “other” landscape, the seascape, but the search for a life different from the one that determines our existence on Earth.

Text by Chus Martínez