I first met Savvas Christodoulides in 1984, as he was studying art in Toulouse, France, while I was figuring out my path as a writer, between poetry and philosophy. We have since kept contact, despite living at long distances and in diverse continents, despite the unceasing waves of life.

Savvas Christodoulides is one of the most brilliant artists I have had the privilege of following. I admire his aristocratic indifference vis-à-vis the urgencies of trends and fashion, and I have witnessed, time and again, the unwavering capacity for anticipation that his art bears: Christodoulides has already been there, done that, before everyone else, and certainly before the crowds.

His art, in whatever medium he accomplishes it, features an ancient virtue called sprezzatura. Attributed in old art treatises to painters embodying ‘difficult easiness’ in their work, notably those who were able to show facility where there is extreme difficulty, sprezzatura is a concept that Savvas Christodoulides masterfully exemplifies in new formal territories.

The word masterfully might seem, however, contrary to sprezzatura, precisely because the essence of ‘difficult easiness’ is opposed to the display of virtuosity. Sprezzatura operates by spontaneously shrouding virtuosity so the works that result from it do not suffer from the often-tedious laboriousness found in the ‘virtuoso’. If Christodoulides’ arts lives, and I certainly believe that it breathes with amplitude, wit, elegance, wise economy of medium, and unexpected poetry, it is because there is no virtuosity -but rather spontaneous ingenuity- involved in the masterful genius of its assemblages, its material core.

Savvas Christodoulides has built his oeuvre on the legacy of the modern objet trouvé. His sculptures are three-dimensional ‘collages’, resulting from a logic of ‘montage’ where unlikely connected furniture-elements define a poetics of bricolage, as images connected despite their diversity, featuring an aesthetics of de-functioning (desoeuvrement), a weaving of what normally cannot be woven. But there is also a resonance of classicism in his oeuvre, for the best description of the agency that his sculptural assemblages convey could be that old, winckelmannian expression: a ‘noble simplicity’, a ‘quiet grandeur’ -metamorphosed into a radical contemporary language.

The profound poetic effect of Christodoulides’ objects therefore lies on the vivid colliding of cultures, ancient and modern, forgotten and current that someone born in Paphos -the very birthplace of Venus- might embody. It is fitting to recall the term defining the ineffable quality of masterworks since Plinius’ Natural History: ‘charis’ or ‘grace’, also named ‘venusté’. In Christodoulides’ work there is unexpected ‘venusté’, the unpredictable seduction of objects intentionally divested from their function, expanding our perception through an endless array of connotations. Of all these new sculptures there is one -ironically titled Titan- that summarizes the common thread of the show -and maybe the ageless endeavor of artists-: to carry the world on the shoulders, like an Atlas, to stack objects over objects, things over things, bodies over bodies in order to listen, from the empty cage of the present, a long-ago song of birds, a language no-one fully grasps, revealing in lightness the resounding beauty that comes from the inexhaustible survival of Babel.

Luis Pérez-Oramas, Art Historian, Curator