Jannis Kounellis has always cherished a fond memory - I would even call it a veneration- of ''those Greek mothers who, rather than bringing up their children to stay by their sides, prepared them to leave home.'' But of course these adventures come to an end sooner or later with the long-awaited return to Ithaca.

Often when Kounellis is asked about the idea of the voyage as an aesthetic reference throughout his work, he replies categorically -perhaps because he is well aware that this abstraction was the leitmotif used to exhaustion during the irreverent and dilettantish eighties as a justification for all kinds of frivolity -that ''every journey is in some way an initiation: it is an idea of expansive, amorous, collective consciousness'', and then goes on to destroy the obviousness of the physical displacement.