Echoes in the Darkness

In the Greek port of Piraeus, there is a small tramp steamer moored at the dock. The Ionion's cargo decks are laden with the works of the Italian artist Jannis Kounellis, born in Piraeus in 1936. The ship, and its manifest, are a metaphor for the high priest of "Arte Povera", the art movement founded in Italy in the late 1960s. Kounellis, as a student in Italy, had found in the Renaissance masters Giotto, Masaccio and Caravaggio, his own elliptical ideas of space and form. They helped him on a journey, one of many, a restless exploration of the notion of art that had, for him, been stigmatized by the prevailing critical view. These journeys, literal and metaphysical, were to an Ithaca of the mind, almost odysseys that could have no realistic or expected ending. Kounellis' exhibition of 11 live horses in a Rome art gallery (1968) and "Albatros" (1991) are, though more than 20 years apart, both part of these same journeys. This selection of Kounellis' writings does not necessarily explain his theories, his visionary meanderings and voyages. The writings do, however, illuminate his powerful intellectual and emotional sensibilities, and allow an insight into a unique understanding of art and, as importantly, life in the late 20th century and onwards.