“Ap-eikonizō”: Odysseas Elytīs, painting and the Platonic reconfiguration of Greek aesthetic continuity

Abstract

This article examines Odysseas Elytīs’s aesthetic thought through the lens of the reception of antiquity, arguing that his reflections on painting can be read as articulating a counter-genealogy of Western aesthetics. Against modern European accounts that construe ancient Greek art as either a historical origin or a lost normative paradigm, Elytīs reconceives Greece as a living mode of perception, defined by a specific sensory-expressive configuration that persists across epochs. The article first reconstructs Elytīs’s notion of “Greekness” as a non-Western perceptual modality irreducible to iconographic transmission. It then analyzes his theory of pictorial representation, centered on the distinction between apeikonizō and eikonizō, and suggests that this pair can be read as reactivating Plato’s distinction between mimēsis phantastikē and mimēsis eikastikē in the Sophist. Through this Platonic framework, Elytīs challenges the dominance of perspectival and chiaroscuro-based representation in Western aesthetics, proposing instead a mode of figuration that resists illusionism and subjectivism. Finally, through Elytīs’s reading of modern Greek painting – especially Theophilos Chatzīmichaīl’s and Nikos Ghika’s – the article argues that the rejection of momentariness and sensible contingency in pictorial representation does not simply resolve into pure idealism, but that his “solar metaphysics” can be understood as pointing beyond Platonic idealism by reconciling the ideal with the intensification of sensibility.