“… It’s been a while since I left blue behind. Trapped inside ocher, maroon, brown, and mint green. I live in a palette of dark colors and among common objects. I follow my course through the vacant spaces of the everyday, between papers, washbasins, desks, chairs; my shoes do not match, I beg a flowerpot in vain, slip over, and fall facedown on the curb, over and over again.

“I oscillate between the emotional impasse of inevitability and the anticipation of imminent change, between serenity and sadness, between total defeat and deliverance. Sometimes I seethe in anger, sometimes I drown in depression, sometimes I experience seas of happiness. I never speak out loud. My face almost expressionless, I communicate through a series of seemingly absurd gestures while remaining constantly imprisoned in this place—or nonplace—which is timeless and solitary. A non finito condition that unfolds in cycles, but at each new turn, the change is only ever minimal.

“Occasionally I attempt to escape from the background, climb into square or rectangular openings, as though windows. Often I get dizzy and pass out; I stay there, hanging from the sill, until I come to. Once I found myself drowning in a flooded kitchen. I was there with you. We must have left the tap running, and so we sat on a bench, waiting for the water level to rise.

“I reminisce about our time together, the countless hours we spent in armchairs facing each other, sometimes with our heads on the floor and our feet toward the ceiling, responding in any way we could to what was happening, inside and outside the painting.

“My name is Costas, and the year is 1950, it could also be the sixties or eighties, 2000 or later—I’m not sure about the date, actually. Who are these men and women around me, all of them so disquieted? I am not sure about them, either. I usually wear a suit to keep myself in check, but I don’t always succeed. I could be the antihero from next door, the archetype of the oppressed man, the betrayed citizen, or maybe, I am a figure in the paintings of Apostolos Georgiou, born in Thessaloniki, in 1952 …”

—Marina Fokidis