Yiannis Spyropoulos Greek, 1912-1990

Yiannis Spyropoulos became known in Greece as the poet of abstraction. Having experimented with various styles and evolved artistically over a period of time, Spyropoulos' work reached maturity in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. It is in the works from this period that space and form began to constitute a unity, and it was by virtue of them that he introduced abstract art to Greece.

In works such as the present work Spyropoulos created pictorial space and texture by using scraps of paper, burnt objects, wax and coated collages accentuated by colour, which became the corporal substance of his painting. These compound ingredients formed both the pictorial space and theme of his works, and imbued them with dramatic expression, blending architectural structure with pure form and colour.

It has been pointed out that 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 the colour red emerging through the black surroundings. There is usually a little green in his paintings, sometimes grey and yellow, and very rarely blue. Red, however, is almost always present, intervening sometimes as small blotches, sometimes as a focus of light. In his abstract works colour ceased to be a characteristic of objects, developing into an automonous 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).