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There is a painting by Ghika dating from 1931, entitled ‘The Balcony’. A balcony projects over a closed back courtyard of Paris flats. And so the antinomy is created: the woman sitting on the balcony appears imprisoned in the very space in which she has come out to breathe. Imprisoned by the narrowness of space with the immense walls surrounding it. The sun that comes in from above merely intensifies the agony, so that the transition from closed to open space is almost annulled. Space remains virtually closed, and as the only escapes to infinity it offers mysterious and dark windows that look at the woman like eyes, while she is trying to open her horizon through them. And the woman sits there, motionless and in a reverie.

     That is the characteristic space in which Ghika’s painting usually moves. It is the space of an introvert painter. And even when Ghika portrays nature, the open air and the sky, the pictorial space of his painting remains a closed space, dominated by the dread of the void: horror vacui.

     The objects he paints in this space are aligned and organized, leaving between them strange vacuums as if to emphasize that the entire space is mysterious, container of a world of shapes that jostle one another and try to fill infinity. But Ghika’s infinity remains bounded, in harmony with the tradition of Ancient and Medieval Greek art, even though here the boundlessness is accentuated, as in the paintings of Byzantine art. Because the search for infinity in him, too, goes not towards the breadth of external space, but towards the depth of the inner space of the soul, where the representations of the outside world crumble and are reshaped into a new world of the imagination.

     This nervous horror of space, of space in depth that dreads the void, reappears in Ghika’s later works, where he is preoccupied with railings — prison bars that constrain the gaze, but at the same time bars through which the gaze escapes to infinity. A balcony repeats the theme. Its railings separate the inner from the outer world, the spectator from the spectacle. And yet through these railings the spectacle flows into the spectator organized, ordered in space and time, and the spectator, too, goes towards the spectacle and becomes for a moment at one with it. Only for a moment, because the railings remain indestructible, like a filter of the essence of the world. The introvert soul of the artist never surrenders fully to the outer world; it returns ‘to itself’.

     The same element appears again in Ghika’s latest works in another form, when the theme of the labyrinth predominates. Old cities, ruins of ancient buildings in labyrinthine formations, project the maze of a soul that is searching for itself.

said Heraclitus.

     But the road inwards, the endless search, is an end in itself. And that is why mazes have never ceased to fascinate men. Mazes as the eternal dead-end of man, mazes as the meaning of the history of ruins, lost worlds that remain stubbornly present. Mazes as the meaning of the present world that harbours the future. And these three moments of anguish live simultaneously in Ghika’s work.

     The ‘horror vacui’ in Ghika’s painting, then, is not merely the dread of nothingness in itself, it is also the product of the search through the labyrinthine complex of the world of shapes, rhythms and moments. That is why, even when his painting depicts a contemporary place, usually his own island of Hydra, the spectator is forced to walk between its buildings, its parallel and adjacent planes, its rectangular cubes and its curved walls, in an adventure of the gaze that is endless. It is a world trembling on the verge of dissolution, which is yet rebuilt at every moment, like a symphony in the making.

     In the composition of this symphony, a new antinomy appears. That maze of shapes, that horror of space, are ruled by a severe geometry. And not only because the volumes of the buildings and the morphology of the Hydra landscape are in reality geometrical. Under Ghika’s gaze the phenomenal world has been dissolved, analysed and reconstructed geometrically. To understand this, it is enough to compare a pen-drawn sketch by Ghika in 1945, where I would say he ‘imitates’ realistically the form of the port and the landscape, with the Hydra of the Carras collection of 1948. In the latter the ‘imitation’ has been abolished, outstripped. The painting is divided into rectangular panels, parallel and adjacent, even overlapping in places. In the central panel the port itself is developed, the nucleus, with the buildings aligned geometrically and drawn without perspective. In the side panels there are streets, elements of vegetation, rocks and, above, the general shape of the island, the sea, the sun, clouds, and the moon.

     All these are separate moments of the vision, reorganized into a final architectural view of Hydra, the real Hydra, the Hydra which the spectator ought to be seeing if he is not unmusical and not carried away by the photographic lens and the painting of the Renaissance. The point of view here is not fixed, it moves. And the perspective of depth is shown indirectly, as in the Byzantine mosaics. That is in fact how we see, and that is how the Greek artists saw in the Middle Ages. So we do not have here a cubism by imitation, but by reversion to indigenous and imperishable models.

     One might add that Ghika loves cold colours, so that his paintings sometimes give off a feeling of highly refined glaciality. The pointillisme of which he often makes use forces one to view his work from a distance. Thus one reaches a point of abstraction, where the meaning of the subject seems to fade away. One asks: What is this? What does it represent? It attracts me, but why does it move me?

     And yet Ghika never abandons meaning, the theme of the quest. Or rather, he never abandons the concrete. Even in his latest works, for example, the ‘Rain in Boetia’ of 1959, the theme is there, it was not added as an afterthought. Ghika’s pictures spring from a vital experience in face of the concrete. At the same time, Ghika’s painting remains a kind of laboratory painting; the moment has been transmuted, has been married to other remembered moments, up to a point where the shapes become pure ideograms, at times hieroglyphics, reassembled in a complex autonomous organization.

     If art is poetry, in the primary meaning of the term, Ghika’s poetry is apparent in every stroke of his brush. He gazes at the outside world, he scrutinizes it and finally he presents its essence, the world of the ‘inner vision. The Byzantines did the same. And if anyone thinks that the Byzantines did not carefully observe the outside world, he is mistaken.

     Ghika’s vision is not far removed from the Byzantine mosaics of the Chora Moni. His buildings are depicted with almost the same rules of perspective. It is a perspective in motion, not with one fixed point of view, but many. Sometimes a gesture derived from Pompeian recollection is added — as it was also to the Chora mosaics. Recollection of an escape into space and light, of the softness of bodies, as in the ‘Morning Sea’ of 1942. These are Ghika’s rare idyllic moments, soon abandoned in the return to stern self-discipline.

     Vegetation most of all, when it becomes Ghika’s centre of vision, takes on an exotic air. Cactus-like shapes dominate, with large-scale fleshy leaves. The leaves of trees are depicted rhythmically, as if on dry branches, at times almost freezing into marble and blending into the rocks. Birds, making the air vibrate with their sharp wings and open beaks, fly low as if on their first flight. Everything condenses, entwines, buzzes, so that a feeling of jungle virility is created, in spite of the geometrical texture of shapes.

     The great curves that often divide space, as in ‘Gardens of Crete’ of 1953, do not succeed in cancelling this feeling of the jungle; nor do the later polygonal shapes of the 1959-60 paintings. The curves rather create embryos of life in genesis, while the polygonal shapes, crossing each other, are like beams illuminating a life that vibrates in whatever plane one meets with it. The leaves become hieroglyphical, prototypes of the rhythmical dance of nature. Sometimes, high above, there appears the general shape of the island of Hydra, the kite like a bird that hovers in the sky, the sun and the moon producing the only notes of stillness and elation, summarizing, watching.

     But Ghika’s birds do not move, they hover with open wings. They stand like the kites he paints in the skies. They are cries of freedom, but from creatures that cannot escape from the confinements of space below. They are content to fly over it and watch over it. For Ghika’s skies are not open; they are full of schematic clouds, other birds and kites, compelled to remain spectators of the world beneath, where the drama of agony and redemption, of life and poetic creation, is played out.

     In a 1939 picture, called ‘The Caterpillar’, the caterpillar itself is only a minor episode in the painting, which contains birds, cocks, pigeons, cats, dogs, flowers and plants in the courtyard of a house, and in the centre, standing motionless, two young people, a boy and a girl. In the background are rocks; overhead, kites and clouds. Everything dazzles with sunlight. And yet the young man, a cloak thrown over his back and in front naked as Adam, meditates. His large and heavy head dominates, his face is ungainly, his eyes look as if asking: What can there be beyond the power of man to create? What can there be beyond this world that fluctuates and throbs around me, that crawls like the caterpillar, grows like the plants, and rises like the kite that now and again I set free to compete against the birds? The shadows falling on the ground find their counterpart in the black depth of the open window, whose interior awaits the young men who went out to enjoy the light of the world and whom wonder petrified.

     Ghika takes pleasure in self-concealment. He names his painting after an insignificant object, the caterpillar. He takes its fact as his starting-point and by introspection finally creates a complex, vital experience far removed from its origins. So perhaps when he calls a picture ‘The Caterpillar’ he does not in fact conceal himself; on the contrary, he reveals himself in revealing to us exactly how he works, how he creates from the one the many and from the many the one.

     The supreme antinomy of Ghika’s art is expressed in his 1947 work, ‘The Black Sun’, where a luminous sphere radiates from behind a black spot. It is the spot that is perhaps the core of the mind of every questioning man, particularly in our time, the well of the unknown that accompanies every vision of the world, every flash of knowledge.

     A journey such as Ghika’s — the Greek’s continuing journey in a world that, for all its admiration of Greek values, remains anti-Greek — has no end. It is the Odyssey of contemporary Man. Kazantzaki described it and now, in kinship with the vision of the ascetic Creton nihilist, Ghika is drawing it.