Yiannis Tzermias – In the Depth of the Tragic - Oedipus, Images After the Blinding / The Ring in the Marsh of Water Lilies

The myth of Oedipus, as reimagined by Yiannis Tzermias, is a turning point in his art. Here, as in the earlier tragedies he has embraced (Agamemnon, Medea, Ajax, Philoctetes, Bacchae) the personal becomes mythic, and myth becomes autobiography.

It is not a shadow from another time. It is an open wound of human fate. From the infant delivered to the shepherd, feet bound, to the blinded king who stands before his own truth, the path unfolds like a slow procession toward what cannot be escaped. In his images, blood and ash are turned to color. Light does not redeem. It burns. The viewer does not witness tragedy. They undergo it.

After the blinding, Tzermias returns to seal the myth, to endow the hero with mystagogy. The landscape sinks into dense pitch, heavy, suffocating. Road, murder, riddle, love, prophecy, blindness, they converge as prologue to his visual chant. And at the center, the shepherd. The first witness, bearer of the curse. He carries not only the infant, but the weight of the whole story. From him, the artist’s dark allegories unfold: the feet of the hanged Oedipus. The portrait of Amalthea, the goat with the sardonic gaze, the irony of a fate that both nourishes and destroys. And then, like the chorus of an ancient play, one hundred and fifty portraits of goats. Innocent, mocking, playful, demonic. A polyphony that sketches the very face of humanity.

At the crossroads. At the Sphinx. At Jocasta. Figures convulse, as if hybris itself were burning before us. The truth is revealed in the portrait of self-blinding, where gold and ochre ignite a storm, the canvas charged with the weight of the tragic. Knowledge is paid for with the very light of the eyes. Tzermias’ painting is relentless. Doric. Incandescent with the fire of the tragic. In his palette echo Cavafy’s words: “like the useless light that shines, yet does not save.” Black, white, red, ochre — clashing like fists. Gold breaking through savagery, a promise of transcendence, a parable of a new testament. In his figures, man wrestles with his own being, naked before destiny. Awe comes first. Not only in the nature of the tragic. But in the very form of its representation. The grandeur. The scale. The atmosphere. They recall the mute, suffocating vibrations of a double bass rising from the depths. His shaping is like clay in ceaseless motion, turned and pressed, until the final form is revealed. His search for inner truth becomes a landscape that seethes and boils.

And within this fiery landscape, his words echo:
“The heroes of tragedies speak to every hidden fold of human existence.”

Oedipus becomes the human condition itself. A man who sees only when blinded. Who is saved and destroyed at once. In Tzermias’ work the double truth is revealed: the tragic is not an abstract idea. It is the very foundation of our existence. His painting becomes Oedipal ritual. He himself, a conjurer of ideas, a player of myths reborn, where human existence stands stripped before its fate. In the depth of the tragic, Tzermias discloses the unyielding duality that dwells within every soul.

Niovi Kritikou

Yiannis Tzermias – The Ring in the Marsh of Water Lilies

A fairy tale whispered to him by his grandmother becomes, for Yiannis Tzermias, the beginning of a new imagery. The swamp, as a central site, is not merely a backdrop. It acts as an archaeological ground, a timeless womb where memories and figures sink. From its dense waters emerge nocturnal creatures, mythical faces, and water lilies that swallow existence, drowning every attempt at escape. From Neapoli to Dridos, the painter’s personal memories give form to hidden, tale-like references that thicken the stage of his vision. At the threshold of this narration stands the portrait of the grandmother with her scarf fluttering, a harbinger of the storyteller, guardian of the myth now reborn through painting. Her gaze foreshadows a secret path, full of mystery.

His works unfold every nuance of the black-and-white scale. With thick brushstrokes, dramatic contrasts, an atmosphere steeped in film noir, he suffocates the light and creates an inner tension. Pure, revolutionary colors, yellow in particular and some red strokes, appear as sudden flashes on the canvas, fragments of truth, fleeting ideas that burn before vanishing again into night. Light, in his works, is dramatic. It does not save but marks anguish, struggle, the pursuit of a distant inner goal. The fairy tale becomes here a contemporary parable, with the hidden ring at the center. The key for the princess. Desired, buried in the swamp, it is both the secret object of the quest and the key to redemption, lying within murky waters and within the concealed depths of the self.

As in Mahler’s 3rd and 5th symphonies, Tzermias’ narration rises and collapses, reaching resolution in an almost absolute cadence. The central piece of the cycle is the artist’s self-portrait holding the ring. Tzermias becomes the hero himself, weaving into the work a multitude of autobiographical threads. In contrapposto, he appears dramatic, marked by the shadow of tragedy that accompanies all his works. His atmosphere is gothic, medieval, yet at once romantic, in the sense of the self-destructive romantic hero, with Platonic longings and the eternally unfulfilled demand.

The swamp exists in every work like a veil, encircling the castle that is only ever implied. A forbidden, prophetic realm that emerges only in the viewer’s imagination becomes a field of inner excavation. This image spreads across the canvas, laden with humidity, fog, and mist, cloaking the landscape. His seekers of truth are lost in the counterlight. His brushwork wrestles with form, resists it, and then returns to it, solid and unyielding. Figures distort, burn in blinding white light, then vanish into the depths of black. And yet, beneath the anguish lies a promise: the Absolute Desire, happiness, completion. His figures rise like the first-born out of the earth, soil-bound, marked by sacred mud, by the very substance of existence. Time does not flow linearly in his work. It breaks into fragments, like cinematic sequences. The viewer, in turn, becomes a claimant to the ring. The treasure hunt transforms into each one’s personal mystery, a call to participation in the deciphering. Of the self? Of the goal? Of desire, or of the endless circle of fulfillment? In every reading, his work sketches the notion of finality, of purpose.

Recalling the words of Novalis, “where we are, there is the mystery,” I encounter Tzermias’ swamp. It is the mirror of that mystery. A place of shadows, of longing, of redemption. And the riddle remains open to the viewer: is it a beginning or an end? Who is it that holds the ring?

Niovi Kritikou