Mandala 2 – Building

A mandala is traditionally a diagram of wholeness: a circular model for how the cosmos is organized, used across cultures as an aid to meditation. Faitakis reimagined that inherited form through the lens of the Cretan School of Byzantine iconography, laying geometric construction over a gold field and letting the circle act as a compass of modern life. Executed in mixed media (acrylic, egg tempera, spray paint, and stencils on canvas), the surface balances abstraction with representation, and his black humor with icon-like gravity. Here the rotating core is built from construction sites: buildings mid-assembly, cranes, heaps of aggregates and inert materials. Among them, workers appear with halos, sainted and exhausted at once, as if labor itself had become the new devotion. The composition proposes a constructed world that oscillates between promise and destruction; the tighter the system, the more fragile it feels. A Byzantine inscription along the lower edge seals the image like liturgy. The work was first presented in the exhibition “Thesis–Antithesis–Synthesis: In the Belt of Change,” curated by Katerina Koskina, at Ocean Flower Island Museum Park, China (2021).