I
Mark
A cut becomes deliberate when it enters rhythm.
Poetry · Linear B · matter · light
What survives
becomes language.
Nikos Samartzidis carries Greek poetry into Linear B. He gives living words an ancient body and a once-silent script a new voice.
01 / First reading
First, the signs ask to be seen.
Guided light study · paired captures pending
Grillos · 2016
Acrylic on canvas · 50 × 100 cm
Keep scrolling to follow the reading.
02 / Transformation
He gives an ancient script living words. Living words find another life.
The surviving Linear B tablets preserve the earliest known form of Greek, chiefly through administrative and economic records. Samartzidis enters the space they leave open: poetry.
“These small symbols … would carry me off one day on a journey in space and time.”Nikos Samartzidis, 2003
He first met their signs as a school student and later at the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion. After emigration, they became an indirect route back to Greece: its language, light and poets.
The movement goes both ways: contemporary verse travels backward; an ancient writing system returns to the present. What has been separated comes into relation again: mark and meaning, fragment and whole, past and present.
Turquoise, blue and gold are not decoration around the text. They are active forces: beauty keeps the work sensuous, open and alive.
03 / Assembly
Meaning gives
the fragments a body.
The pieces meet without concealing their seams. Meaning is the bond: the poem lets each fragment remain itself while the whole begins to resonate like music.
White 1 · terracotta · animation study View the original artwork ↗04 / Four forces
Once language finds a body, it learns to survive by changing one.
Four ways into one practice: mark, language, distance and survival.
II
Language
The sign carries more than words: the cultural breath, the pneuma of the Mycenaean world.
III
Distance
Emigration turns place into an image carried inward: ports, trains, horizons, the sea.
IV
Survival
Canvas, clay, sandstone, disc: no material owns the word. Each gives it another future.
05 / The braid
The script is ancient. The voices are alive.
Across the works, Homer and Sappho meet modern voices. Elytis is a central presence, alongside Ritsos, Seferis, Cavafy, Kazantzakis and Gatsos. Their words pass through Linear B into color, incision and light. Across emigration, the braid carries Greece as a living language, not a fixed memory.
“Not that they speak, but remember. Actually, it begins with me.”Nikos Samartzidis
English rendering · exhibition text, 2010
Discover the words behind the works →
06 / Artist
A life carried through place and language.
Born in Aridaia in 1957 and raised between Athens and Thessaloniki, Nikos Samartzidis found his visual language through painting, ceramics and the landscapes of Crete and the Aegean.
After working as a professional potter and establishing a studio in Horto on Mount Pelion, he moved to Germany in 1990. Distance became catalytic: memory, Greek poetry and the ancient signs of Linear B converged into a sustained artistic practice.
07 / Passage
Continue the passage.
To collect a work is to enter its next life: carrying its language, poetry and beauty into another place, while helping the practice continue.
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