GIANNOULIS CHALEPAS CREATION AND PSYCHOSIS

Περίληψη

The life of Giannoulis Chalepas (Tinos, 1851 - Athens, 1938) resembles a dark fairy tale, with ingredients that exert a timeless and irresistible fascination: the talented young man who experiences heartbreak, madness, long confinement in a psychiatric hospital, and the loss of his stoical mother, before his rediscovery and the restoration of his reputation with the strange works produced as an otherworldly recluse in his old age. This study goes beyond the myth to focus on the elements of his personal journey which can be verified and can support tenable clinical hypotheses. What is remarkable in the case of Chalepas, what is truly exciting and has prompted so many psychological interpretations of the sculptor's life, is the astonishing revival of his artistic powers after forty years of mental illness and social isolation. In this book, Vlasis Skolidis explains Chalepas's creatively mature and mentally calm late period by drawing on the concept of the sinthome developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This highly original theory suggests that behind and beyond the subject of the unconscious, with its linguistic origins, is another dimension in which the speaking being is called on to exist as an "answer of the real". Although immersed in a world of silence, Giannoulis Chalepas was the bearer of just such an unfathomable and unforeseeable existential choice, based on the physical activity of sculpting and its image-making possibilities.