Thanos Tsingos

Tsingos is best known for both his flower paintings and his 'relief paintings.' The present work witnesses the marriage of this subject and technique to great material and aesthetic success. Colour is applied directly onto the canvas from the tube of paint, giving the work a dynamism and immediacy of expression that is reminiscent of the Surrealist automatic writing. The attention shifts from the subject to the very act and tactile quality of painting and the painted surface. The irregularity and energy of the linear marks implant new life into the traditional still life genre.

Tsingos was one of the earlier artists to become involved in the tachisme or art informel movement, a counter-attack to Abstract Expressionism gaining momentum in the United States in the 1950s. He 'created works feverish in style, the fruit of frenzied delirium, in which gesture and metier activate the painting surface' (Marina Lambrakis-Plaka, ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 684).