Jannis Koulnellis (March 23, 1936, Greece–February 16, 2017, Italy), By Manuela Gandini

“This is not the Europe we dreamt of at the end of the war,…”
—Jannis Kounellis

Explosion #3 “Jannis, are we going to make it out of this?” I asked him on the phone in a hushed voice. “Yes,” he replied with his inimitable inflection, “but only if we can hear the breath of the other person, to listen carefully to him, to go towards him.” This was the ending to the interview with Jannis Kounellis that I was preparing for “Alfabeta2”. It was about the violent, desperate, humiliating street demonstrations in Athens against the Troika and the economic crisis that was corroding bodies and minds. “This is not the Europe we dreamt of at the end of the war, not the one we put all our energies into,” he told me mournfully. Kounellis is a humanist, a powerful interpreter of the real, classic and revolutionary all at the same time. “I’m a painter,” he said and took reality between his hands, hands soiled with machine oil, among hundreds of black garments, shoes and hats, iron, gas cylinders, horses, tutus, ox carcasses. The dark overcoats, mute existential objects, in his work, lose their shape and pile up on each other like stones, like absent bodies, like ghosts. “I’m running towards death,” he whispered to me, “I’m not going to wait for you!” His intense ability to reconstruct the dramaturgy of life has been an unbroken flow between art history and democracy. “For me, Italy was the construction of roots that I didn’t have,” and he was referring to the artistic heritage that we’re often unfamiliar with. Jannis is a happy and wounded poet, a 20th-century Odysseus shrouded in a cloud of smoke. Walking among his works is like going through a factory that goes straight into your nostrils with the smell of iron, war, work, used goods, life. But it’s also like travelling under full sail along the Peloponnese where you meet the gods.

Manuela Gandini lives and works in Milan. She is an art critic and curator, teaches at NABA in Milan and contributes to the newspapers “La Stampa” and “Il Manifesto”. She is the author of lectures and body-talks conceived as devices for transforming critical writing into theatrical actions. She published the book “Ileana Sonnabend. The Queen of Art” (Castelvecchi 2008) and, with Raffaello Siniscalco, made the film “Leo Castelli. Il signore dell’arte” (RAI, 1992). Exhibitions include “Taking The Picture” (Leo Castelli Gallery 1990); Venice Biennale 1993 “Le Lettrisme”.