SCULPTURE

Hope in Plaster

"We have a patient. We have placed him in a plaster cast. We keep him there until the wound heals," said Premier George Papadopoulos, the colonel who is strongman of the current Greek military regime. He was only trying to explain why civil and political liberties in Greece remain suspended under martial law. But it was the sort of metaphor that appealed quite naturally to Assemblagist Vlassis Canairis, 40, who studied medicine at Athens University before turning to the practice of painting and sculpture in 1950. The exhibition that he has mounted in Athens' small "New Gallery" illustrates its vividness, though not in the way that Papadopoulos intended.

The dominant work on display is a tableau featuring eight torsolike constructions made of wire netting swathed in plaster, lined up against a wall painted to look like a strikingly blue Greek sky. The figures are bound to the wall by strands of concentration-camp barbed wire. Another piece consists of a plaster "torso" wearing a bloodstained gray jacket, its arms flung out handless in the posture of a crucifix. Two or three blood-red cloth carnations sprout from the jacket's inside pockets. Still another assemblage presents a shoe embedded in a plaster block. Where the toe dared to protrude from the block, it is chopped off in procrustean fashion; a carnation sprouts from the gaping hole.

Canairis maintains that "I never get involved in politics. My message? Simply that where death is, there is also life." To visitors who come to the gallery, he passes out small square blocks of white plaster with a carnation embedded in each. Despite only two guarded references in the censored Greek press, Athenians have made their way to the gallery in droves. They come in twos and threes, solemn, quiet, and most make their comments in whispers. But a few have been more outspoken. Said one young man: "The wire will be snapped off, the plaster will break, and the carnation will give off its perfume again." Added a university professor, who has recently been dismissed from his post by the regime: "Let us hope that by next spring flowers will be able to bloom again from the earth, and not from plaster."

Canairis himself is discreetly noncommittal. Said he: "Let each keep the message that suits him."

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