Nonda - 1980's Painting and Monumental Sculpture

1980's Painting and Monumental Sculpture

In 1981, feeling the need to continue work on the monumental sculptures, he moved with his family to his childhood home in the suburbs of Athens where he found the quiet and the space necessary for this heavy work. For the next ten years he would devote himself to the strenuous task of bending steel, mixing cement, creating molds of plaster and wire, alone, without assistance, often working all night with the help of powerful spotlights. This was arduous and thankless work, each piece requiring enormous physical and psychological effort from a man who was already in his mid sixties. One spring he grew dizzy and fell from his own scaffolding while working on the concrete molds. It was the first in a series of heart attacks which marked the beginning of a serious decline in health. The sculptures, massive and monolithic, weighing three to four tons each, were abstracted human and animal forms. Because of their marble-textured surface, no one guessed that they were constructed of cement. With hues of ochre, grey and obsidian and others verging on creamy white and yellow-rose, they looked more like giant formations of unusual stone. When asked why he had chosen such an untypical material he replied, “’Attractive’ materials bother me. We can’t always work in marble. Glass in its cleanliness, its playfulness and glimmerings, its rainbows, doesn’t suit me.”

While he worked on his sculptures he was also painting a series of very abstract acrylics on a type of rice paper which marked a return to sculptural forms in his painting as well as the use of text which linked abstract thought and female form in a poetic mélange of eroticism and fantasy. Constantly experimenting with new materials, he used wax, sand, egg, powders, plaster, stone and even coffee to achieve the desired effects. He was beginning to investigate fiberglass and new polyurethanes when his health prevented him from exploring them further. By this time he had distanced himself entirely from the art world. Always nostalgic for Paris, Nonda used French text in many of his paintings in the 1980’s and consistently told his wife he wanted to return permanently to Paris once the sculptures were finished. The sculptures were eventually exhibited at Dexameni Square in the Kolonaki district in Athens. At the close of the exhibit, because of delays in transportation, an order given by the then mayor of Athens, had the sculptures removed with cranes and large trucks to “a city storage facility.” Nonda, recuperating from heart surgery at the time, as well as neurological damage, was unable to respond quickly. All but two of the massive sculptures disappeared en route. A long and mishandled court case concerning the disappearance of the sculptures ensued with no results. The only two pieces actually recovered were found by the artist himself in a municipal storage depot. What really happened to these sculptures and where they were sent remains a mystery as well as a national disgrace to this day. .