The city of Aphrodisias was built in the Bronze Age in honour of Aphrodite in what is now Turkey – a Hellenistic centre of religion and culture. The local cult, as was often the case in antiquity, appropriated the goddess of love and moulded her in its own image. In other words, the Anatolian Aphrodite is slightly different from the Greek one, as if she were different in myth from the original, yet they share the same name and the same meaning.
Endre Kecső’s painting does something similar with the gods and goddesses when he repeats them in his canvases of different sizes and colours until they are recognisable only by their attributes. In his paintings, the concepts of goddess and muse are almost fused, and the sacred is brought very close to the ordinariness of human life, with its strong presence of physicality and sexuality. The divine creative power is interpreted as procreation in the figures of the lightning men, which is as much about perpetuation as it is about sustenance. Aphrodisias was destroyed by an earthquake, but Aphrodite was not.