Art: Sculptor of Gods

“If I were Chinese, I would think and work Chinese,” says Christos Capralos, 55, but Capralos is a Greek and everything is all Greek to him. He lives against the azure sky that reflects the Mediterranean, surrounded by olive groves that mantle mountains where the nobility of man has been the artist’s ideal since the days of Polyclitus. Capralos does not mean by his remark to compare himself to the ancients; he aims at modern work while remaining tied to the ancient tradition.

Thus he sculpts archaic warriors centaurs and gods (see opposite page) —and sculpts them as half abstractions or stretched out almost like the stick figures of Giacometti. But where Giacometti shows man squeezed in the torture of existence, Capralos’ bronze men are modeled with a stripped, surging nobility. In 1962, Capralos’ sculptures were the sole occupants of the Greek pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There Manhattan Dealer Martha Jackson signed him up for his first U.S. show of >4 bronzes, now on view in her gallery.

Stolen Sketchpad. Capralos casts his sculptures in his own foundries When one was built a year ago on the island of Aegma, near Athens, workmen found ancient castings on the seaside site from a foundry believed to date from the 6th century B.C. “I was glad,” says the white-haired artist, “that I am moving on the same grounds as my ancestors.”

But the affluence of a personal foundry came to Capralos late. During his student days in Paris at the Grande Chaumiere, he was so poor that he filched sketching pads. Accused of the theft by an English art student, Capralos threw back the Elgin marbles: “You rich Englishmen have stolen the whole frieze of the Parthenon! How dare you protest when a poor Greek takes a sheet of your paper?” During World War II, Capralos made his own warring frieze a 135-ft. by 33-ft. monument, in plaster relief, to the Greek repulse of the Italian army in the Pindus Mountains No one bought it.

Of Life & Death. Capralos sculpts with flat sheets of wax, folded and kneaded. Bolstered by armatures, the wax sometimes bellies out like breastplates, sometimes ripples like drapery in a breeze. He builds a mold around the wax with brick dust and melts out the wax. When the molten bronze pours in, the fluid planes of the sculpture retain in lustrous metal the quickening touch of the artist’s hands. Capralos also makes minuscule bronzes, some no more than three inches high, which have the pulpy look of ancient artifacts dug up after centuries. Some are whimsical toys others complex hieroglyphs—one called Sacrifice is at once bull and matador, the horns becoming the man and his sword while another semicircular form suggests that the whole object is the sword’s hilt.

The boldness of Capralos’ bronzes conveys his belief that man has the stuff of gods in him. Asked if that was his message to the world, he replied, “To hell with messages. I simply defy death and love life.” Then he gestured to the limpid day outside, and asked his questioner to join him for a swim in the sea.