Born in Greece, near the Volos marble quarries, he studied art and sculpture in his native ‘cradle of western civilization’, before setting out as a twenty-seven year-old for Britain, Spain and Bali.
This started his quest for the traces of an ancient vanished wisdom which inspires his work. It led him from Egypt to Mongolia, from Yucatan to Cambodia. He visited Siberian shamans, Indian medicine men, steeping himself in their symbolic language, and finally settled, or at least hangs his hat, in the highlands of Bali – itself an ancient cradle of artists and mystics.
The depth and range of his travels have exposed Filippos, more than most of us, to the globally scattered clues of high wisdom which was once shared universally by vanished cultures. Megaliths and petrogplyphs, yantras and zodiacal systems. For instance, provide physical clues; but psychological clues exist in human genetic memory, passed down the generations in rituals, stories and insights, say, of Siberian sages, or Huichol Spirit Guides.
Filippos is thus influenced by both the formal symbolism of sacred systems, (such as Pythagorean Geometry or Tantric mandalas) as much as by personal dreams and visions, either shamanically shared, or experienced alone for instance, staggering awestruck through the temples of Ankor Wat, and noticing the kinship of these faces with those of pre-Colombian America. He’s really, like all of us of course, just trying to release his own soul from the matter at hand. His work, he suggests, reflects the process in himself of revisiting the Old Eternal Truths, finding out what they really personally mean, and rebirthing their universal values in the present. Even his smaller pieces have a strangely permanent and megalithic quality about them, and yet, on closer inspection, they reveal themselves as monuments to the transparency of matter.
Lawrence Blair
Author of Ring of Fire
