Yiannis Spyropoulos Greek, 1912-1990

Yiannis Spyropoulos became known in his homeland as the poet of abstraction. Having experimented with various styles and evolved artistically over a period of time, Spyropoulos’ work reached maturity in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. It is in the works from this period that space and form began to constitute a unity, and it was by virtue of them that he introduced abstract art to Greece.

In works such as the present work Spyropoulos created pictorial space and texture by using scraps of paper, burnt objects, wax and coated collages accentuated by colour, which became the corporal substance of his painting. These compound ingredients formed both the pictorial space and theme of his works, and imbued them with dramatic expression, blending architectural structure with pure form and colour.

It has been pointed out that Spyropoulos’s approach to painting was emotional, rather than cerebral throughout his career. Even in his dark period of the sixties the element of hope was clearly signalled in his works by the triumphant presence of the colour red emerging through the black surroundings. There is usually a little green in his paintings, sometimes grey and yellow, and very rarely blue. Red, however, is almost always present, intervening sometimes as small blotches, sometimes as a focus of light. In his abstract works colour ceased to be a characteristic of objects, developing into an automonous value. Spyropoulos wanted to find an absolute type of painting in which colour would determine both form and theme. That theme would be deprived of any reference to the real world, extrapolating the ‘real’ beyond the forms taken by the apparent, rejecting all elements which contained reminders of external reality.

“True to my principles, I sought to develop a texture, quality, and a voice of my own, which, from 1960 onwards, met with universal response and gave me a place in the arena of art. … An innermost desire incited me to redeem myself of the tangible world of the object, and gradually veer towards another intellectual realm and another arrangement of my pictorial world in time.” (Quoted in The Jannis & Zoe Spyropoulos Foundation, Athens, 1992, pp. 24-26).

As Efi Strousa has pointed out, for Spyropoulos the content of each painting thus became the revelation of tones, empty spaces, dense areas, liberating gestures as well as the limits, the encoded aspirations, of strength and weakness, which the world of each artist contains. In the boundless dark areas of his paintings, infinity is created by the depth of colouring, by the dexterity with which he used his brush to flay, to coat, to detach and to fuse the layers of colour, creating a magical space which absorbs the eye, drawing it to an area behind the surface of the canvas. Landmarks in the journey of the eye through the diaphanous darkness of his canvases were precisely the splashes of colour – red, ochre, grey and blue – shaded into a variety of tones by their intermixing with other colours. Colour in this way was a means used not only for the arrangement of space and the distribution of planes. It was primarily a means to energize movement within space, not just on the surface.

In his mature abstract period, Spyropoulos was no longer composing a different image of the objective world, but was breaking up the specific - not in the endeavor to reveal formless chaos, but in order to reveal the appearance of the inner structure of the material world. (See Efi Strousa, Jannis Spyropoulos, Athens, 1989, p. 18). Similarly, the present work can be seen to have evolved around a research into the painting process, emphasizing the lyrical and poetic manipulation of surface and texture without any representational implications, shaping a visual language.