Friends of Paxos and Chris Boïcos Fine Arts have been organizing Greek and international artists’ residencies in Paxos since 2013.
Misha Goro from Chicago and the South African photographer and sculptor Vivian van Blerk, based in Paris, have visited Paxos on numerous occasions. They have created over the years multiple series of paintings and photographs inspired by their experience of the island’s nature, architecture and light.
Misha Goro’s latest paintings focus on the island’s vernacular architecture, old Paxos stone houses shops, ruined huts and traditional church belfries, disseminated through the island. Each painting functions as an individual and expressive “portrait” of a typical Paxos building and beyond its nostalgic quality also acts as a vital historical document of an architecture fated to disappear.
Vivian van Blerk tragically died in his Paris studio at the age of 51 in July 2024. The current exhibition is an homage to his life work and to his abiding connection to the island. In his photographic photomontages of Paxos, “Landscapes & Myths (2013), Vivian fuses current photos of island sites and of passing tourists with classical sculptures and paintings from the collection of the Louvre. In so doing, he establishes an expressive bridge between present reality and ancient myths, with a still unspoiled Mediterranean nature acting as the connection between the two worlds.
Artworks on exhibition :
Misha Goro
Vivian van Blerk
Island Lives
series of twelve photographs 40x50cm 2013
"Persons come and go treading the rocks and sands ill-aware of the lives and stories that precede and will follow their brief passage."
Picturesque Paxos – an approach to representing the already beautiful
"I was invited to make a series about Paxos.
But what to do with a sunny Greek island that offers ready-made picturesque views wherever you pose your gaze ?
Now no land is itself picturesque. But we can make it so by applying some simple conventions we have learnt consciously or less consciously over the years : choose your angle of vision and the time of day, try push the jarring day-to-day elements such as cell-phone adds to the edge of your vision, find balance and harmony in the forms, the colours, the shadows... try and make the whole thing match the pleasing composition you vaguely remember seeing in a painting or photograph or TV ad somewhere goodness knows when.
The picturesque represntation is an invention, an accumulation of picture-making conventions which give order and meaning to brute land. The picturesque turns the fact of a place into the fiction of an individual’s perspective.
That’s all very well but each time I tried apply my individual perspective, all I produced was a standard general tourist snapshot of an unsurprising picturesque Paxos. My bog-standard international-picturesque photos stimulated me to take the obvious next step and make pictures about the Picturesque.
I took hundreds of my shots of picturesque Paxos and broke them into details with which to construct an even more picturesque and fictitious Paxos through collage and montage. Paintings by Poussin, Carrache, Le Lorrain et al in the Louvre accompanied me to help add a shadow at the bottom or a tree to close the edge of a composition, to use high horizon lines to fill the picture space, to mass matching tones and colours for clarity (I didn’t always listen !) and lent me figures to accompany my tourists from Paxos, Corfu, Berlin and Ovidian mythological figures photographed by me in France ,...
Paxos is represented throughout. Only pictures of Paxos were used for the collages. But my personal vision filters the raw material and makes a picturesque Paxos peopled by mythological figures and tourists going about their business of being tourists.
All representations are partial and selective. In photographs real places and things become parts of a story told by the photographer. What you see in the photograph is at once a view of the real and a fiction. In this case the use of collage, chalk, charcoal, paint, montage, and the physical reworking of the resulting negatives makes the picture-making enterprise explicit."
Vivian van Blerk, 2013
Place : Old Schoolhouse, Loggos, Paxos, Greece
Opening Reception in the presence of Misha Goro : Thursday 3 July, 7:30 – 10:30 pm
Entry : Free
Exhibition dates : 3 July to 16 August 2026. Open daily, 8 to 10:30 pm
Information & images : contact@boicosfinearts.com / + 33 686 58 98 09