Spyros Papaloukas

Papaloukas' activity as a hagiographer, decorator, teacher of the decorative arts and Byzantine enthusiast is evident in the flat texture, vivid and contrasting colouring and straightforward, decorative composition of the present work. The bold application of paint into vibrant planes, delineated by pigment-free narrow lines, and the portrait subject reveal Papaloukas' fascination with the elements of form and colour, and the interpretation of space taken from Byzantine iconographic tradition.  

Although the figure in the portrait has distinctive features, the flat nature of the colouring, intensity of the value and tonal contrasts, and the cool palette transform the work into an intense yet objectified decorative motif.

In Seated Woman the flat form of the figure, and the dialectic that can be seen between the abstract and Hellenistic aesthetic as exhibited in Byzantine work make the portrait similar to an icon. The French visual vocabulary of Henri Rousseau (fig. 1), the Nabis, Gauguin and Pointillism was assimilated into that of Papaloukas, and combined with the borderline abstraction and vivid, fragmented colour schemes taken from the art of antiquity.

Papaloukas maintained that art meant 'interpreting the hidden connection between objects, the unity of the world, which is the task of every artist and craftsman to comprehend and make visible to others by means of pure elements, that is to say, in the case of the painter, by means of form and colour' (quoted by M. Lambraki-Plaka in The Credo of Spyros Papaloukas, Zygos, Athens, 1983, pp. 49-50). 

FIG. 1, Henri Rousseau, Portrait de Madame S., c.1898, Paul Rosenberg & Co. Collection, New York
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