Yiannis Spyropoulos Greek, 1912-1990

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 colour  emerging through the black surroundings. In his abstract works colour ceased to be a characteristic of objects, developing into an autonomous 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).

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. As in the present work it was primarily a means to energize movement within space, not just on the surface.