What did a great composer do when he wasn’t writing the wonderful songs he gave us? What art complemented music and developed him as a person and creator?

The prematurely lost composer Marios Tokas took the brush, dipped it in the colors and put his soul on the canvas. We will have the opportunity to see these works, his hagiographies, at the exhibition that opens on Tuesday, December 19, at 7:00 p.m., at the House of Cyprus, entitled “Visual Anthems”.

As he himself had said, “personally, I have no particular relationship with painting, but at some moments I feel that I can come up with some things, mainly on some old wood that I collect from the neighborhood. It would be naïve to think that this thing has or will have any perspective beyond a purely personal affair of mine. It impresses me, because everything that comes out with paint is perhaps related to my tradition, it is always related to the area of ​​iconography and the area of ​​the church”.

The curator of the exhibition, Eleni S. Nikita, notes in the catalog of the exhibition: “The artistic root of Marios Tokas can be traced in the area of ​​Byzantine iconography and is based on his special relationship with the church, a relationship that is not only occasional but, on the contrary, an essential consequence of a family tradition of monasticism, since both his father’s grandparents and parents, as well as his paternal grandmother’s sisters, had followed monasticism, all ending their lives in a monastery.

The sacramental space of the church, the chants, the smells, the evocativeness of the holy images and the power of the whole atmosphere to transport from the material and perishable to the spiritual and transcendent world that he knew from a very young age, were decisive experiences in the formation of the conscious self of him, but also of the world of his subconscious. As an adult, he maintained a personal, free and creatively fruitful relationship with the church, without any religious affiliation or dogmatism.”

At the opening of the exhibition at the House of Cyprus the president of the institution that bears his name, Kostas Tokas, his daughter, Chara, his friend the lyricist Kostas Fassoulas will speak, while Peggy Zina will sing, accompanied by an orchestra made up of Marios Tokas’ collaborators, Giorgos Papachristoudis, Dino Hatziiordanou, Mimi Doutsoulis and Aris Koukos, with the conductor also his collaborator Yiannis Papazachariakis.