Alpha C.K. Art Gallery is about to unveil a new solo exhibition by the historic Greek painter Michalis Manousakis. Titled Anesperon Somaton Yli Paschousa (Suffering Matter of Everlasting Bodies), the exhibition opens on Wednesday and runs for 13 days.

It includes 43 paintings, both small and large in scale, forming the continuation of a body of work that was first presented in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Chania Municipal Art Gallery.

Visual artist Manousakis has, once again, gathered his stories and brings them to Cyprus, as he himself says, “to the other half of the island of Crete, as a journey to his home, Chania”.

In the first section, he presents stories of people he may have once met or may meet imaginatively in the future. Manousakis is a painter of “no-place” and “no-time” – of the space that each of us inhabits silently, peacefully, yet mysteriously and darkly. And suddenly, unexpectedly, colour arrives to declare its thunderous presence, hoping for the dawn of another day with an inextinguishable, sunlit light.

The stories appear unspeakable at times, strange and uncanny. His heroes seem to have escaped to foreign, terrifying yet familiar places, knowing, however, that nothing would change their habits – those of passion, love, hopeless loneliness, the tender blessing of another’s touch, the texture of flesh, the magic of the gaze, of the light.

And all of this emerges from the deep darkness of his underground room, where he keeps notes at the edges of his mind as a reckoning of the day that has passed, of every day, of the life that flows on and declares him present in the world’s registers of absence.

In the second section, Manousakis seems to pose questions such as: what is a perpetrator? Or what unbearable sky, what hermetically sealed space can offer hope to the one who wronged another? Before him, numbers flow like rivers as markers of identity, and behind him, the carved lines – silent wounds of his flesh – seem to remain. His paintings invite viewers to ponder and explore them and they will be on display until December 23.

Anesperon Somaton Yli Paschousa

Solo exhibition by Greek visual artist Michalis Manousakis. December 10-23. Alpha C.K. Art Gallery, Nicosia. Opening night: 7pm. Tel: 22-751325. www.ackgallery.com