Ikarosbooks - In the Depths of Dreams

In the Depths of Dreams

Visual artist Yannis Psychopedis draws inspiration from Octana, one of the finest works of Greek literature, and presents a volume featuring 39 paintings and selected excerpts from the work. Octana speaks of true freedom, and not that terrible irony whereby anything that fits or whatever remains within the narrow margins left to people by the inhuman laws of the narrow-minded, the blind or the foolish is called freedom. As Yannis Psychopedis writes in the book’s foreword: ‘…The great aim of every creative endeavour is to radiate – in the face of all times – a zest for life, and just as for the poet words resemble clay from which the hermit of language moulds new words, so too for the painter the clay is the lines and colours, the grammar and syntax of a new language that seeks to make the impossible possible, to represent a world not as it is but only as it could be...’.

Yiannis Psychopedis

Yannis Psychopedis was born in Athens in 1945. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1963–1968) and undertook postgraduate studies, with a German government scholarship, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1971–1976). He was a founding member of the group ‘Young Greek Realists’ (1971–1971) and of the Centre for Visual Arts (KEI, Athens 1974–1976). He was also a member of the Munich art group 10/9 (1975). He was a guest of the DAAD’s West Berlin art programme (1977). From 1977 to 1986, he lived and worked in Berlin. From 1986 to 1992 he lived and worked in Brussels. In 1994 he was appointed professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions of his work in Greece, France, West and East Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Yugoslavia, Romania, Ireland, Albania, Cyprus, the USA, Sweden, Israel, England, the Netherlands, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Canada, etc., in private galleries, art galleries and museums.

Encounter

Kiki Dimoula, Yiannis Psychopedis

The book includes seventy-three paintings by Yannis Psychopedis, created specifically for this edition between August and December 2006, as a form of inspired dialogue between the painter and the poet. The selection of Kiki Dimoula’s poems was made by the painter himself from her complete works. The publication also includes Kiki Dimoula’s unpublished poem ‘I posted you a pebble yesterday’, written on the occasion of this poetic-visual ‘Encounter’. As Yannis Psychopedis writes in the book’s foreword: ‘…The flow of poetry and that of painting are like two untamed rivers running parallel, each with its own waters, its own sources, yet connected deep within the earth, and emerging from a common outlet… And the more painting and poetry remain true to themselves, the more they can understand one another and capture the deepest psychological landscape, the common ground that connects them and within which they blossomed…’