Yiannis Spyropoulos Greek, 1912-1990

As Efi Strousa has pointed out, for Spyropoulos the content of each painting 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.