Screens, algorithms and data are the modern Symplegades, so crushing that every artist like Homer’s Odysseus tries to overcome them unscathed, in our time.
The challenge is not just to grab attention, but to capture that visual message that will stick like a leech to human consciousness until it changes it. TheManos Ioannidis, with a simple and very comprehensive trilogy of works, a melting penguin, a skeletal cow and a polar bear, composes the Environmental Consciousness Trilogy with intelligent skill and emotional sensitivity. Each project and a different urgency comment on the environment.
Metallic colors, bold outlines and backgrounds of enigmatic syllabics and ideograms of Linear A script engage the viewer in a mythical world as distant as it is unexpectedly close to ours. The figures are imposing, recognizable, familiar, friendly and at the same time tragic, each with the signs of loss, mutation and disintegration. Text, captions or statistics are unnecessary. The silent creatures of Ioannidis thunder with their presence and the gradual loss of their beauty and form.
Before they had time to leave Manos Ioannidis’ workshop, the Melting Penguin gained international recognition as a “global symbol for active climate awareness” when it was honored by the international organization World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF) in Istanbul (28/2/2025). Manos Stefanidis rightly observes that this is “a rare case of pure visual art that is recognized not by a gallery or a museum, but by a global platform aligned with the G20 and which focuses on economic and social innovation”.
The encoded Melting Penguin vulnerability is a color kaleidoscope of gold, purple, light blue, deep blue, green, red, and sienna. Its proud stance as it melts may be a direct comment on the conditions of decay of its natural environment, but more than that, it makes it a totem of innocence melting under the weight of human failure. There is no ice, thermometer, or industrial setting. Surrounded by the penguin, by the ideograms of Linear A present in the mysterious Phaistos Disk, a visual language both ancient and futuristic, the work becomes a monument to future civilizations that will try to decipher the reasons why the planet is leading to climate collapse.
The skeletal cow, with its ribs exposed like gilded prison bars, with a few patches of blue and blue on it to emphasize the contrast between royalty and decay, does not melt like a penguin, but is stripped naked as if it were about to dismember. In the cow, Manos Ioannidis captures the anatomy of the farm. A traditional symbol of motherhood, work, abundance and unselfish supply of goods is weakened by the commercialized over-consumerism of the time that has lost all measure of balance with nature. In the transformation of Ios from Hera into a cow to punish Zeus’ infidelity, there were three colors on her body, white, pink and black, legend has it. It is no coincidence that Ioannidis, using gray on his head, gold on his skeleton and blue sporadically on his body, moves away from the ancient symbolism of Ios as the moon and creates a new initiatory symbol in the most basic pathogenesis of our time: the loss of abundance as a result of the over-exploitation of nature. And this is the coincidental but timely portrayal of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009, 197-222) thought that the Anthropocene breaks down the boundaries between nature and history. Moreover, the ideograms of Linear A as a fixed background of the work, it becomes a visual diary of planetary exhaustion, written in a language that few will ever decipher.
The Polar Bear completes the triptych of climate change. The choice of gold dripping over her body becomes a caustic comment on the gold spilled like a toxic stain, an irony of human greed. Although the polar bear is the most iconic animal when it comes to melting ice and global warming, Ioannidis avoids the stereotype by removing the context and focusing solely on form and flow. The bear is reshaped not as a subsequent victim, but as a tragic majestic figure undergoing ontological transformation (Latour, 2017). Because the bear does not just die, but becomes something else, so that from an animal it becomes an emblem of systemic collapse.
Manos Ioannidis created an emblematic triptych and at the same time a new visual dictionary for the Anthropocene. Ioannidis does not just paint animals. It encodes an era and leaves