BRIDGE
George Matoulas
Peter Lyssiotis
M A S T ER T H I E F
BRIDGE was completed in 2020-the year of the Covid 19 virus. As always, we’ve asked ourselves that one important question Where does this book begin and where does it end?
The answer to the first half of that question is that BRIDGE began 3 years ago. Both of us had seen Le Chants des Mortes while travelling in Spain and Greece left a lasting impression on us. Le Chants des Mortes is a collaboration between Pierre Reverdy & Pablo Picasso-presided over by Teriade. In a way BRIDGE is a response or re imagining of the structure of Le Chants des Mortes.
Teriade is important because of his ability to “marry off” writers to painters and his talent for assembling artists whose work we admire: Leger, Rouault, Picasso, Miro, Giacometti; his preference for a handwritten text & to us, because he is Greek.
Le Chant des Mortes appealed to us as a model because it extended both the artists and the writer. We agreed that for once Picasso didn’t fall back into his stock-in-trade draughtsmanship that magically produced so many images of bulls, artists &models, centaurs, portraits, nudes and the studio….we guessed that Picasso was struggling…and that perhaps, like us, he found the text to be so slippery that eventually he realised he couldn’t set out on auto-pilot…(perhaps such a notion isn’t so far-fetched because Picasso rejected the first set of prints he made for the project.)
Also, we made the call, as Teriade did, not to follow the traditional format for an illustrated poem in translation: so both text and image live together on the same page. We have taken the mise-en-page a step further & considered it as a reflection of the text & the image co-existing on the same page, and consequently the Greek mingles with English, & the English with the Greek.
Yes, we used Le Chants de Mortes as a guide-, in so far as we caught the reflection of Picasso’s brick –red lithos in our terracotta prints; yes, we reproduced a hand-written text ( though through silkscreen printing rather than lithography); we made BRIDGE to the actual size of the original & issued our book unbound which was also true of the Reverdy- Picasso-Teriade production. However, both the themes of the text & the subjects of the lithos in BRIDGE break away…there’s more reality here, which replaces the surrealism and abstraction of Le Chants de Morts. Perhaps this is because we are working with an actual time & place. The text was written in 2018 & and the place was Cyprus…specifically the Ayios Georgios Monastery at Mavrovouni, in the district of Larnaca;where within a small area there is a cross section of the island’s history: there is the monastery itself, built on the ruins of a 12th Century Byzantine church. Behind the Monastery there is a military checkpoint: razor wire, guard dogs, watchtowers & military equipment; then there is a no-man’s land-barren and heavily mined. Beyond, there are the Turkish Cypriot conscripts, guard towers & razor wire. A white helicopter with blue U. N. Markings monitors the zone. This is the Green Line which separates the Turkish population from the Greek. In front of the monastery there is a bitumen road & across it there is a mine which produces umber. So within this small military area there are 3 distinct strata: the military, the spiritual & the commercial- all 3 span huge chunks of time.
BRIDGE is the third book project we have collaborated on. There was Journey(1999), His Wayward Hand(2005) & now BRIDGE (2020) In an oblique way, the 2 threads which run through all 3 collaborations are firstly, interrogating the idea of a homeland and secondly, looking back on our parents’ lives (& therefore to our own past).
The text and the images keep their integrity because there isn’t an attempt by one to illustrate the other. Originally we planned the prints as collographs, but then we opted for lithos, so we could get the density in colour & heaviness in the mark marking.
Throughout the project our guides Georges Rouault, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Frederico Garcia Lorca and Yiannis Ritsos were by our sides.
(As for the second half of that one important question that book artists should ask themselves-ie where does the book end-well, initially in your hands, & then….?)