“When we don’t know simple things, such as why flowers grow secretly, we divert our attention to beaches,” wrote the poet and artist Etel Adnan, when thinking about place and how it helps to conjure ideas. This longing for nature’s creative potency can also be found in the way artist Olàh Gyàrfàs approaches his sculptural practice—one where his materials, textures, and forms have intrinsic connections to the natural environment. His art works are like acts of translation—attempts at capturing both the abstract details and the emotional registers of places and their objects. As an artist who also has a long history as a successful fashion designer, Gyàrfàs is attuned to the dichotomies of function and form, design and art, and the fragile relationship between nature and culture.

The commission to design Gary’s Bar at the Santozeum similarly began at the beach—Vlychada, on the south of the island. A place that is marked by its geological formations—imposing cliffs with curious cavernous shapes and pathways formed through centuries of contact with the wind and the sea that loom brightly over black volcanic sand. In this lunar landscape the artist found a spiritual affinity, translating its spectacular and affective qualities into the interior of the bar. There, you find several individual sculptures and installations touched by the forms and histories of not only Vlychada beach but the multiplicity of Santorini’s characteristics more broadly.

As a whole the space feels airy, lightly touched, almost minimal in its design. The palette of the main room is earthy and muted in tone: It has sandy-beige walls; an L-shaped bar made from lightly textured white Spanish tiles; low soft pillow lounge chairs next to marble tabletops that sit upon large slabs of grey rock. One wall displays a pair of sculptures that are composed of found rocks which were collected by the artist and then strung together to be transformed into lyrical free forms that give movement to otherwise inanimate objects. As with much of his work that uses found material, the rocks are sensitively handled—repurposed yet respected for the individual histories they hold. The most commanding element is the wall behind the bar itself—painstakingly formed by the artist’s hand using polystyrene and plaster—with an arrangement of irregular openings, or small caves, which range from shallow holes to dark receding voids. Directly inspired by Vlychada’s wind-carved rock formations, Gyàrfàs’s interpretation undulates along the wall, hugging the original cave-like architecture of the space. Its colour—a cool blue-ish shade of white—differentiates it from the others, transforming it from architectural feature to site-specific sculpture.

Amongst this reflection on nature, and natural material, are details that surprise and sparkle with baroque opulence—perhaps reminding us that we are in a functioning bar, one that is the first queer bar on the island. The bathrooms, for example, are gold. They glow, adding a hint of camp glamour and a different kind of sensorial experience. The concrete floor is an imperfect golden-brown, covered by a pattern of spots and uneven shapes that implies the effect of water damage, or rather indicators of hedonism—spilled drinks or sweat falling from hot dancing bodies. These markers of culture are celebratory, signifiers of recognition and safety. Vlychada beach is also known as a gay beach on the island, a further invisible thread knowingly binding that unofficial queer space to this official one.

In Santorini (2022), installed elsewhere in the Santozeum, Gyàrfàs combined plaster with sand and small rocks found on the island to hand-mould a wall-sculpture that is abstract in shape. The work is free from any specific association to object—natural or man-made—but its materials ground it to the island. Its rounded, imperfect forms are immanently tactile. The artist encourages people to touch it, fond of the shininess that might occur through many hands slowly polishing its surface over time. In other works, Gyàrfàs has used a dishwasher to clean objects, such as rocks and an antique chandelier, or placed natural fabrics into industrial washing machines. I understand such processes as further strategies of translation—as explorations of how to replicate natural acts such as the sea washing against a rock, or the effects of different types of weather.

In Overlay (1983) Lucy Lippard examined the importance of pre-historic art forms to contemporary art, writing that we needed to remember what art was originally about: “one of art’s functions is to recall that which is absent—whether it is history, or the unconscious form, or social justice.” Gyàrfàs’s commission for Gary’s Bar, but also his work more widely, seems to understand such an appeal. The Santozeum is located in Santorini’s main town of Fira—famous for its picturesque blue and white houses that cascade down the hillside overlooking the island’s impressive caldera. It offers the perfect Instagram-able holiday destination—one of the main attractions for the island’s millions of tourists yearly who swarm its narrow streets wielding iPhones and selfie-sticks. From that vantage point, along the caldera rim, you see everything in glorious panorama—it is easy, even unwittingly, to miss the island’s geological intricacies or its rich cultural histories. Gyàrfàs’s interior for Gary’s Bar invites us to quietly reconsider. Inside he sensitively coalesces the landscape with sculptural form, intent on engaging the bar’s visitors with the unseen materials and foundations upon which the island sits.

Text by Kyla McDonald

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