Spyros Papaloukas

After his return from Paris in 1921, Papaloukas focused on painting the landscape and traditional architecture of his homeland. The majority of these works from the twenties were executed in Mount Athos, Aegina or Lesbos. In these paintings, as in the present work, he increasingly experimented with colours, applied boldly to make flat linear patterns of vibrant planes. Combining ideas derived from modern French painting with the Byzantine iconographic tradition, Papaloukas created works that were highly personal and expressive.

The interpretation of space, as well as colour, light and tonal contrasts were of great interest to the artist. The present work reflects Maurice Denis' maxim 'a picture, before being a horse, a nude or some kind of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order' (Maurice Denis, Théories, Paris, 1920, p. 1). As Marina Lambraki-Plaka has noted, 'the alteration of light and dark fields articulates the composition, investing the surface with an inner pulse, making its rhythm more vivid and helping the eye explore the pictorial space' (quoted in Modern Greek Art – The 20^th Century, Athens, 1999, p. 36).

To Papaloukas, artistic creation thus centred quintessentially on two elements: shape and colour, and he 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 a painter, by means of form and colour' (quoted by M. Lambraki-Plaka in 'The Credo of Spyros Papaloukas', Zygos, Athens, 1983, pp. 49-50).