In the café of the National Archaeological Museum, from August 5 to September 3, 2024, the solo exhibition of Spyros Romanos entitled “August’s” will be hosted.
Barefoot on the sun-burnt stone.
Unripe pomegranates and the chord of cicadas.
Intoxicating like the unmixed wine of the festivals, sickle-holding as in the tapestries handwoven under a full moon, relentless like the summer winds that stir up the sea. Imperial as well as plebeian, the hot month of August shaped in human terms, but also beyond them.
Augustus’ sensitivity is captured by Spyros Romanos, in a conceptual framework, corresponding to Lysippus’ “Kairos/ Opportunity”, where the multiplicity of the meaning exceeds visual literalism. A pupil of Panagiotis Tetsis and Dimitris Mytaras at the ASFA (Athens School of Fine Arts), Romanos draws from these first teachers the warmth of colours, the hedonistic deposition of pigments on the carrier material, without this being enough for him. Free of morphoplastic conventions, securing an alibi for it from his apprenticeship in the workshop of Nikos Kessanlis, where from he graduated with honours, he perceives each brushstroke, a firm or fleeting one, as a personal narrative, as his self-referential imprint in the sea caves.
Works the common denominator of which is that they were made in the inactivity of summer idleness by hands immersed in grape must and watermelon flesh, are presented in this solo exhibition. A series of watercolours and drawings – almost automatic as to their execution – bring back spatial and temporal memories rather than visual impressions of empirical reality. Works that close the ears to the mournful sound of the bell, to be sanctified by the vibrating flesh on the sweaty sheets of a divan, or by the thirst for ice water after a cloyingly sweet spoonful of vanilla. And through the experience that is transfigured into visual act, without any other earthly or unearthly mediator, to cross directly over to immortality.
Simply. Humanly.
True to his own demon.

Entrance to the Cafe is free.
Exhibition duration: August 5 – September 3, 2024
Exhibition opening hours: Monday to Sunday: 8:00 – 19:00
Tuesday: 13:00 – 19:00
Supervision: Evangelia T. Kairakis – Art Historian
Organizer: Emilia Kougia, tel. 6944417606
Address: National Archaeological Museum, 44, 28th of October (Patesion) street, Athens 10682.
Information: www.namuseum.gr