September 21, 2026 | Art & Culture
SUMMER RENAISSANCE
words Onur Baştürk
In Summer Renaissance, Greek visual artist and photographer Michalis Goumas places the male body underwater — weightless, anonymous and almost outside time. Made in the Aegean, the long-running project draws on Renaissance imagery while exploring physical intimacy and the unpredictability of water.
ANONYMITY, DESIRE AND THE AEGEAN
Michalis Goumas has been working on Summer Renaissance for nearly two decades.
Now gathered in a 200-page coffee-table book, the project began as an experiment in composition before developing into a study of the body, water and light. Much of the series was photographed around Kythnos, the island where Goumas grew up, with male figures swimming, touching and surrendering themselves to the sea. Photography and painting overlap throughout, as do classical references and the present. We spoke with Goumas about the project’s beginnings, his fascination with the male body, anonymity and desire, and the Aegean landscape that continues to inform his visual language.
How did that early experiment evolve into the project we see today, and when did you realise it was becoming a larger body of work?
In the beginning, it was more of an experiment in composition. I was interested in the human body as a visual element, creating digital compositions that carried something of the density and theatricality of Renaissance painting. I wanted to see whether a contemporary body could hold that kind of visual memory without simply reconstructing the past. Over the years, I began to remove rather than add. The digital construction gradually disappeared, and water took its place. Beneath the surface, many of the things I had previously tried to construct were already happening naturally: the body became weightless, light distorted it, gestures gained an unexpected grandeur, and a simple moment could suddenly evoke sculpture or painting.
I think that was when Summer Renaissance truly began. I was no longer simply photographing people in the sea. I kept returning to the same idea through different bodies, summers and kinds of light. Eventually, the images began to speak to one another and form a visual language of their own. That was when I understood this was no longer just a series of photographs, but a body of work that could continue to evolve with me.
FOR ME, WATER BECAME A KIND OF COLLABORATOR
What drew you to these two elements — water and the body — and how does that relationship connect, for you, to the representation of the body in Renaissance painting?
Water changes the body without asking it to perform. That was what fascinated me from the beginning. Underwater, the body loses some of its gravity, its certainty, even its contemporary identity. Limbs stretch, gestures become slower and light fragments the figure in ways that are impossible to fully control. That transformation naturally brought me back to Renaissance painting, where the human body is never merely anatomical. It carries emotion, drama, sensuality, spirituality and an almost architectural presence within the composition. I was interested in finding a contemporary equivalent of that feeling without recreating Renaissance imagery literally.
For me, water became a kind of collaborator. It allows the body to move between something very physical and something almost mythological. A person swimming in the Aegean can, for a fraction of a second, appear to belong to another century. That brief suspension of time is probably at the heart of Summer Renaissance.
MY FIGURES OFTEN RESEMBLE WARRIORS
The male body is such a strong presence throughout Summer Renaissance. What does the male body mean to you as an artist, and what continues to draw you to it as a subject?
What draws me to the male body is the sense of energy and presence it can bring to an image. My figures often resemble warriors, as if they are constantly fighting against an invisible force. We are all fighting something: some win, some are defeated, some rise back to the surface, while others disappear into the dark depths. I am interested in that transition from strength and resistance to surrender, when struggle and the loss of control can coexist within the same body.
THE DIRECTION I GIVE IS MORE ATMOSPHERIC THAN CHOREOGRAPHED
There is something distinctly physical about the way male bodies come together in these photographs. They swim, touch, embrace and sometimes seem to be caught somewhere between choreography and play. What kind of direction, if any, do you give the people you photograph before they enter the water?
Before each shoot, I look for locations with clear water, the right depth, colour and light, because the environment largely determines how the bodies will move within the image.
The direction I give is more atmospheric than choreographed. I often film myself moving underwater to suggest a certain quality of movement, and I sometimes show paintings to the swimmers, not for them to imitate, but to communicate the mood, tension or overall feeling I am looking for. From that point on, I leave enough space for the water and the bodies themselves to shape what happens.
DESIRE IS NOT NECESSARILY SEXUAL
How much of what we see is constructed and how much is left to chance? I’m particularly curious about the faces: in some photographs, they seem almost deliberately obscured or absent. Is anonymity part of the work, or is this simply something that emerges through movement, water and light?
I like anonymity because it allows the viewer to read the image freely, without being tied to a specific person or a specific story. Very often, what someone sees or feels is far removed from the actual circumstances of the shoot, and that interests me deeply. More generally, this is something I value in art: the moment when a story I had never even imagined begins to take shape in someone else’s mind through my work. From that point on, the image no longer belongs entirely to me.
Desire seems to run quietly through Summer Renaissance. There is water, the body, physical proximity and a very direct kind of nudity, yet the images never feel overtly sexual. How do you think about desire within the work?
For me, desire in Summer Renaissance is not necessarily sexual. It is more about an attraction to the body, to closeness, touch, water, even to something that cannot be held onto. I like it to exist as an underlying tension within the image, without ever needing to be fully explained.
KYTHNOS AS A WAY OF SEEING
As I understand it, you photographed Summer Renaissance in the Aegean, primarily around Kythnos, where you grew up. What kind of island is Kythnos to you?
Kythnos is not simply a place for me, but a way of seeing. I grew up with its light, bare stone, wind and sea, so all of these became part of me long before they became part of my work.
I don’t see it as a picturesque Cycladic island. To me, it has something more austere, elemental and almost timeless. It can be incredibly beautiful, but also harsh, and perhaps that is why I keep returning to it. In Summer Renaissance, Kythnos is not a backdrop. It is part of the image itself.
The book feels like more than a record of a photographic project; it also seems to reflect a very personal idea of beauty. Is Summer Renaissance, in some way, a product of your own fascination with beauty? And what does beauty mean to you today?
Yes, definitely. Summer Renaissance was born largely from my own fascination with beauty, though not beauty as perfection. I am more interested in those moments when something becomes beautiful because it is fragile, temporary and impossible to repeat in exactly the same way. Today, I think of beauty less in terms of harmony and more in terms of the intensity and truth of an image. It can exist in a body, a gesture, an imperfection or a fleeting moment of light. Perhaps that is why I keep searching for it.
MY VISUAL WORLD COMES FROM WHERE I GREW UP
Where does your visual world come from? What do you find yourself returning to again and again for inspiration?
My visual world comes largely from the place where I grew up. I was raised on an island, in a seafaring family, with grandfathers who were sailors and fishermen, so the sea was never simply a landscape to me. It was part of everyday life. Water, humidity, the oxidation of copper, the colours of rust, stone and the intensity of Greek light keep returning in my work, both in photography and painting. At the same time, I am influenced by classical art, sculpture, cinema, photography and design. Together, all of these form a visual vocabulary that I carry with me and that often returns, almost unconsciously, in everything I create.
BETWEEN PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY
You are both a painter and a photographer, and Summer Renaissance seems to sit somewhere between the two. When you look through the book now, do you see it primarily as a photographer, or is the painter in you still shaping the way you read these images?
I would say the two ways of seeing are now impossible to separate. When I photograph, I often think like a painter: about composition, masses, colour, light and the relationship between bodies. And when I paint, I carry with me the immediacy and unpredictability of photography.
Looking at Summer Renaissance today, I don’t see it purely as a photographic work. For me, the images exist somewhere between the two media, and perhaps that is exactly where their identity lies.
After working on Summer Renaissance for almost two decades, what has the project revealed to you about yourself? Do you think the way you look at bodies, intimacy, beauty or even the Aegean has changed through making it?
Perhaps the most important thing it revealed to me is that a work that lasts this long eventually begins to observe you as well. You think you are recording something outside yourself, but after years you realise that, without noticing it, it has also recorded the way you have changed.
