One explanation of the word ιδιώτης (idiotis, private person) in Ancient Greek is “a person not concerned with the Demos, the public affairs”. A second explanation is that of the unskilled and the ignorant person. In the meanwhile, things have changed significantly: The idiotes in capitalism are far from being ignorant, they are actually close to being deified – private initiative is the measure of all development, the heart of bourgeois triumph. In times of crisis, though, the idiotes have fallen into decadence.
The series of woodcuts by Gabriel Andronikidis entitled “Idiotes” renders with a sense of tragedy and irony the heart-breaking fall of the private person, of the man and woman, deified for their “heroic” defence of themselves and of their profits, who are now dissolving into thin air.
Wood, the artist’s favourite material, for it makes room to the spontaneous and the unexpected, blows life into the idiotes that rise in all their splendor and facelessness, in an almost Cycladic bareness, as lonely and disfigured trees, giving shape to a peculiar forest – society where each person lives their drama alone on their pedestal, with no wish to communicate with the others – Demos is not to be found here. The loneliness of the individual is enhanced rather than alleviated by their proximity.
Andronikidis’ forms point to the organic, primary, abstract forms of modernism. His work has references to sculptors such as Rodin, Archipenko, Brancusi and Moore. However, Andronikidis’ idiotis lacks the self-confidence of the wandering dandy or the detached optimism of the rising bourgeois; here we come face to face with their dramatic deposition, a deposition that perhaps might give rise to the return of the “demotes”, the public persons, the people.