Petros Vasiliou Kritikos, Athenian-born in 1956. I studied Mathematics at the University of Athens beginning in 1974 and I finished in 1989 without obtaining a degree as I had not completed nine units. I returned to the study of Mathematics in 2006, interested, as I was originally, in its foundations and philosophy. Emancipated from the school environment, I initially had hope in the hypothetically favorable, to the highest degree, intellectual spirit of the university, which proved an inadequate natural extension of high school and a preparatory stage for a professional career and an implicit large, or small, pension, in other words, sheer desperation, tuck your hand inside so we can close the coffin.

And cursing thereupon my fortune’s lack, as per Elytis, I decided to become self-employed, self-engaged and various other self-serving and self-sustaining energies, something like an extended sort of autism, if I understand the psychopathological term properly. Any which way, in this circular activity methinks (a dative form for the lettered, a relic) I succeeded in persuading spouses to join with me as per the tenth muse, as per Plato, Sappho, or Psappha, I have a beautiful child whose face is like golden flowers, my beloved Cleis, that is, I was married twice and I have a daughter.

During all this to-do I also met Mr. Nikos Gavriil, after his father, Pentzikis, Thessaloniki-born in 1908, prose writer and painter who developed a technique called “enumeration,” by which he transformed texts in the Greek into paintings, through the simple method of corresponding the letters of the Greek alphabet to 24 numbers in numerical order, namely α-1, β-2, γ-3, δ-4, up to χ-22, ψ-23, ω-24. After he had pulled apart the text and found out of which and how many letters it was composed, he would place the derived values of the letters on the paper, which he painted by corresponding them to simple linear shapes, that is short lines and dots, crosses, waves, and others, where each one had a specific numerical value. He described the technique comprehensively in a text in the book Watery Overflow, Paratiritis publications, where he analysed in detail the text Flora or Laura by Alexandros Papadiamantis, where I studied it. With this technique I composed the present works.

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photos: Nysos Vasilopoulos, 6th Athens Biennale 2018 ANTI