Memories, his very own memories of situations, feelings, people, are key in the work of Michalis Manoussakis. From such a personal and private starting point, he reaches out towards timeless and universal issues. The artist creates an enigmatic space where men and women engage in ambiguous relationships of love, desire, tension, fear. As the artist says, "My journey in art begins from what I experience. That is what I depict in my paintings. I begin with rhythmic motions of the pencil that bring out images. When I feel that one of these is a mirror of my memory, experience, or of the world, I turn it into a work." It is a metaphysical quest taking place in a dreamy, almost apparitional world. His work is figurative but not realistically descriptive. Manoussakis's figures are abstracted nudes, neutralized, with generalized features and a lack of reference to a specific historic or geographical milieu. They are simply outlined in a style characterized by an economy of line, reminiscent of the figures in the ancient Greek vases. They stand as archetypal symbols of people, men and women.
For a long time, Manoussakis has painted on wood instead of canvas. The selected material becomes an essential part of the work. He states: "I work with wood because as a material it offers resistance, it has a multiplicity of textures, and, most importantly, the color of wood allows me to render flesh and earth tones. I don't know, however, if by wounding the wood and, by extension, human flesh, the drama of the material or the human body is allowed to show through." The figures are outlined with charcoal on the wood surface; often the color of the wood is the flesh. In his more recent work, the artist unevenly sculpts and scratches the surface of the wood in the area of the body, symbolically exposing the flesh underneath the skin.
In the exhibition in Poros, Manoussakis presents a group of works on old closet doors. These doors enclosed spaces where clothes were hung and protected. The memories are associated with the bodies that the clothes covered, the smell, the touch, the warmth of these bodies. From that starting point, and taking advantage of the preexisting division of the doors into four vertical panels, the artist reworks and develops further the concept of horizontal diptychs and triptychs of his earlier works. As in those earlier works, parts of different actions create vertical tetraptychs with continuous and discontinuous narrations, forming puzzles where it is not obvious where the different fragments belong. Do they belong to the same person, are they dream images? As in most of Manoussakis's work, the playfulness of the puzzled image is just on the surface - the skin of the work. The work is erotic but tense and melancholic at the same time. The fragmentation of the action in the panels either reconstructs the narration or indicates a complete fragmentation, an amputation either physical - suggested by the panel fragmentation - or emotional or even an erotic castration. In his work, women are objects of desire and love but of fear as well. In The Game of the Figures, the woman is holding on her beautiful elongated fingers a miniature male figure. She looks at him critically, investigates him as a kind of small specimen. Independently from the physical coexistence, the discrepancy of the sizes of the male and female figures suggests a distance, as well as the reality that often in a relationship what we see and how we are seen are two different things.
In addition to his own experiences, in his images the artist filters collective memories, readings, and other works of art, creating an open, idiosyncratic, multi-reading visual narration. Playfully and with charm he describes himself as a "storyteller of visual speech." His visual narration is expressed with complicated, almost surrealist imagery. In the work Untitled, the top and bottom panels establish the context. The male figure on the top - the artist himself? - holds a pair of scissors suggesting a cutting of the conventional logic and of the expectations of the viewer, reminiscent both of Bunuel's opening of the Chien Andalou and a reversal of the story of Samson and Delilah. Then, to further the psychoanalytical uncanny, overtones of the work in the bottom panel echo the graffiti in public restrooms. A phallic image is in a "conversation" with a fertilized female shoe, pointy with high heel and with surface lines suggesting hair, establishing a parallel context to Meret Oppenheim's famous fur cup (1936) or pins referring to the surrealist imagery of Man Ray's Gift (iron with nails, 1921). The two middle panels present fragments of female bodies. Is it the same body as the woman in the top panel? The flesh color differs. What happens with the flowers between the open legs of the woman? Do they suggest secretion and flowing bodily liquids dropping on the model of a house? The artist does not give a title; Manoussakis rarely gives titles, and when he does it is a stimulus, a guide towards a reading. In the above tetraptych, the artist leaves the viewer to fill out the meaning, based on his own experiences, his own memories and desires. Regarding his work, Manoussakis characteristically says "Painting is a journey to Acheron. I transform gravity, solitude, tragedy and human torment into light because I am an optimist. All that I see around me goes through me and is filtered. But then, I close my ears and try to hear my own painting." That is what the viewer is asked to do, to reflect and to hear his own music.

Tatiana Spinari-Pollali