The Heart
3D artwork, mixed media with acrylics 107 x 122 cm
by Pantelis Melissinos
Athens 1995
This work by Pantelis Melissinos functions as a contemporary visual allegory of the heart: not the heart as a sentimental or decorative symbol, but as a place where passion, wound, memory, bodily mechanism, and spiritual revelation meet.
The large red heart dominates the composition as an archetypal form: immediate, almost childlike in its recognisability, yet at the same time heavy, physical, and emotionally charged. The red is not merely the colour of love; it is also the colour of blood, life, sacrifice, and intensity. Across this organic form, a white geometric field cuts through it like a bandage, a passage, or an architectural incision inside emotion.
At the centre, the illuminated lamp becomes decisive. It is not simply a technical element; it is the core of inner vision. The heart is lit from within, not from outside. This radically changes the reading of the work: truth, memory, love, or pain do not arrive as an external revelation, but as an internal combustion. The small lamp resembles a secret sun, a pulse of consciousness, a point where matter acquires a soul.
The metal or wire-like lines running through the centre create the impression of an electrocardiogram, a nerve, or an energetic pathway. It is as though we are seeing the heart not only as emotion, but also as mechanism, circuit, and organ: something that beats, breaks, recovers, and becomes illuminated. The green line, with its irregular movement, introduces something living, almost vegetal, against the hardness of the geometry.
Particularly interesting is the contrast between the handmade, imperfect, human quality of the work and the light, which seems to seek a transcendence of decay. The piece does not pursue cold perfection. On the contrary, it preserves the traces of its making, the textures, the slight irregularities, as if insisting that the heart is never symmetrical in its experience. It is wounded, repaired, illuminated, and yet still alive.
Symbolically, the lamp at the centre may be read as hope, inspiration, consciousness, or even the artist’s own creative flame. The heart is not presented as a passive emblem of feeling, but as a workshop of light. Where there is an opening, an absence, or a wound, Melissinos places light. This is perhaps the deeper message of the work: the wound can become a source of illumination.
It is a direct but not simplistic work, poetic but not decorative. Through the use of the heart, light, and handmade construction, Pantelis Melissinos creates an object that stands between painting, relief, and visual installation. A heart that is not merely seen; it is switched on.