XTC, 2019
Mixed media on wood
Courtesy The Dakis Joannou Collection
Stelios Faitakis’s work highlights the profound intersections between Byzantine, post-Ottoman, and contemporary visual cultures in this part of the Eastern Mediterranean. His painting constructs a hybrid iconographic universe where local and supra-local traditions coexist and are reinterpreted. XTC is typical of the artist’s distinctive visual language, in which elements of Byzantine iconography, monumental painting, and urban culture are linked to contemporary narratives and woven into dense allegorical compositions. Faitakis, who emerged from the Athenian graffiti scene of the 1990s, developed a singular painterly idiom characterised by bold figures, golden hues, and symbolically laden narrative scenes. In XTC, the concept of ecstasy —as the title suggests—and the notion of the transcendent so prevalent in Byzantine iconography, whose conventions Faitakis appropriates, are rendered through a composition that balances between the secular and the spiritual, the everyday and the visionary: a crowd reminiscent of icon-like figures, though otherwise distinctly contemporary, gathers together dancing, with arms raised. As is often the case in Faitakis’s work, the image functions as an allegory for the human condition, combining elements of contemporary experience with an almost mythical iconographic universe.
The work was presented in 2019 as part of the exhibition Awe by Hydra School Projects, curated by artist Dimitris Antonitsis. The exhibition explored different forms of worship, awe, and spiritual fervour through works by contemporary artists, creating a dialogue between the aesthetic and the existential. Within this context, XTC can be seen as an iconographic study of the experience of ecstasy – whether as a religious, social, or psychological state. In Faitakis’s paintings, figures from different eras and cultural traditions coexist in complex narrative landscapes where the sacred and the everyday intersect. The flat, almost iconographic organisation of space evokes Byzantine painting, while the abundance of details and symbols creates a contemporary allegorical universe. The expansion of the colour palette toward cooler tones intensifies this effect, altering the emotional temperature of the image and reinforcing the sense of an inner, almost contemplative ecstasy. Thus, the work refers not only to a momentary experience of intensity, but also to the enduring human quest for meaning, faith, and transcendence within a world of contradictions.
Stelios Faitakis was born in Athens in 1976. He died in 2023.
