Greek Painter Dedicates Athens Mural to the History of Olive Oil Production

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With his dense and intense style of street art, painter Stelios Faitakib takes a pen­e­trat­ing look at domes­tic olive grow­ing, using the vocab­u­lary of the Greek Orthodox Church in his lat­est work: ​“The olive tree as a world sym­bol of sports, cul­ture and peace.”

In the indus­trial zone of Piraeus Street, out­side the Elais build­ing – one of the biggest olive oil com­pa­nies in the coun­try and a patron of the work – his most recent cre­ation is a huge mural that describes the his­tory of olive pro­duc­tion.

“The mural is divided into parts in a nat­ural way with pauses, show­ing olives trees between episodes,” Faitakib said. ​“Starting from the left is the award of an olive wreath of the Olympics. Then Athena is shown com­pet­ing with Poseidon, the god of the seas, for the patron­age and pro­tec­tion of the city of Athens.”

“Workers pick olives, while to the right an elderly cou­ple takes a break from work to eat a meal con­tain­ing olives and olive oil,” he con­tin­ued. ​“The mural takes a look at peo­ple work­ing to press olives in an old, tra­di­tional olive mill.”

“It was very inter­est­ing for me to cap­ture the evo­lu­tion of time in the mak­ing of olive oil,” Faitakib added. ​“Things are com­pletely dif­fer­ent now. Therefore I con­sider it good to illus­trate the episodes of the mak­ing of olive oil in the suc­ces­sion of cen­turies.”

Part of what makes the mural stand­out in this his­toric city is its sheer size: the length is about 120 meters and the height between three and four meters. Both its size and loca­tion led to a unique series of chal­lenges for the cel­e­brated painter.

“The dif­fi­cul­ties were pre­cisely the size and loca­tion of the spot, in com­bi­na­tion with the sea­son (it was August),” he said. ​“The exe­cu­tion of the project was a great chal­lenge. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to be able to work in rel­a­tively good con­di­tions in the morn­ing. I could never, from what I remem­ber at least, con­tinue to work after 4:00 p.m. with the sun on my back and neck.”

As with almost all of his work, Faitakib uses the famil­iar lan­guage of iconog­ra­phy of the Greek Orthodox Church to tell the story of the olive tree, which is also deeply rooted in Greek cul­ture.

“I use iconog­ra­phy as the basis of my work in the same way that I would pri­mar­ily use the Greek lan­guage if I were a poet,” he said. ​“I am inter­ested in the fact that the visual ​‘lan­guage’ I use is the lan­guage that indi­cates the ori­gin of a work when one sees it in the world, as well as that it speaks to a wide audi­ence.”

However, part of what helps Faitakib’s lat­est work stand out at home is the seri­ous expres­sions of the peo­ple in his paint­ing, which is jux­ta­posed with the more cheer­ful dis­po­si­tion of other Athenian street art.

“Olive pro­duc­tion is quite tedious and demand­ing… at least that’s how it seemed to me when I did it,” Faitakib said. ​“I could have done a group of work­ers laugh­ing at some point but again the seri­ous­ness on their faces would pre­vail.”