Chromatic Values in the Poetry of Michalis Pasiardis

In this lecture, given in Greek at the Archaeological Research Unit, artist and art historian Savvas Christodoulides of Frederick University examines how chromatic values function as both medium and substance in the poetry of the contemporary Cypriot writer Michalis Pasiardis. Drawing primarily on Pasiardis's dialect quatrains (Tetrasticha) and the four volumes of O dromos tis poiisis (The Way of Poetry), Christodoulides argues that for Pasiardis colour is lived empirically and translated into an image of personal relationship and existential pain.

Christodoulides begins with verses in which the poet casts himself as a painter dipping twenty bird feathers into paint so as to see and touch his subject at once. He then traces individual colours across Pasiardis's collections, starting with white. In Pasiardis's verse, white is both a self-sufficient, luminous non-colour that cancels neutrality and an enclosure, such as a white rose, that conceals inner grief or becomes sullied (mouzouri) by tears. Christodoulides sets these passages alongside arguments by David Batchelor and Honoré de Balzac.

Moving to other hues, he considers the unchanging colour of sea waves and the unyielding quality of green, which Pasiardis spreads across mountain slopes like a flat carpet. Christodoulides compares this planar, non-figurative treatment of green to the thoughts of Philippe Jaccottet and the colour-field surfaces of Mark Rothko. A section of the talk surveys Pasiardis's poems dedicated to Cypriot visual artists, among them the folk painter Michail Kashalos, who died after being wounded during the Turkish invasion of 1974, Adamantios Diamantis, Giorgos Polygeorgiou and the engraver Hambis Tsangaris.

The lecture next examines black, comparing Pasiardis with Dimitris Lipertis on the light held within black eyes and on the blackening of the sun that erases all blue, before turning to light blue (galazio) as a solid surface on which human figures and sorrows lean. Christodoulides also discusses chromatic intensification (a white whiter than white, a red redder than fire) and the materiality of colour in the Koitasmata (Deposits) sequence, where the poet digs through earth, water and colours like an archaeologist to uncover a face, an image read through the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion. Later sections address the colour red (a square turned red at sunset as if on a slaughtered ram, a blushing apple, and a corridor between two rose-coloured doors compared with Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault), the treatment of shadow on stone as a tangible colour, and the audible voice of white jasmine.

Christodoulides closes by placing Pasiardis within a broader Cypriot poetic tradition preoccupied with colour and light, citing Vasilis Michaelides, Lipertis, Kypros Chrysanthis and Costas Montis, and reading a final poem in which a dead man's will leaves behind only the drawing of a bird.