Alecos Fassianos

(Greek, 1935-2022)

La photo oubliée

Footnotes

Exposition
Iolas Gallery, Paris.

Littérature
S. Lydakis, Dictionary of Greek Painters and Engravers - The Greek Painters, vol. 4, Melissa editions, Athens 1976, p. 455, no.5 (illustrated).
Sima magazine, no. 21, January-February 1978, p. 32 (illustrated).
Fassianos, Kedros editions, Athens 1980, pp. 105 (listed), p. 98 (shown in a photograph of the Iolas Gallery in Paris), p. 92-93 (illustrated).
P. Cabanne, D.T. Analis, Fassianos, Éditions de la Differénce, Paris 2003, pp. 88-89 (illustrated).
E. Hamalidi ed., Contemporary Greek Artists, Melissa Publishing House, Athens 2004, p. 65 (illustrated).

An emblematic Fassianos from his so called "painterly" period of the mid-1970s¹, this striking canvas shows the artist at his mature best, painting with an extraordinary combination of control and freedom. Vibrant, brilliantly coloured and dynamically balanced, it amply demonstrates the qualities that established his international standing as a master of contemporary figuration.

As noted by Jean-Marie Drot, former Director of the French Academy in Rome, Fassianos sets out to transform the most elemental aspects of everyday life, the most familiar figures into divinities, retracing, in reverse, the ancient tradition that allowed the great Olympian gods to assume the guise of mortals and mingle with them, talk to them and even seduce them without scaring them."² "We are the same with the ancients" says the artist "because we bathe in the same waters, we see the same hills, the same light that has always been there. This is Greekness."³.

By rejecting the illusionistic representation of space, insisting on flat areas of undifferentiated colour and adhering to the flatness of the canvas, Fassianos is reckoned as worthily carrying on the artistic legacy of Theofilos's naivete and the stylistic principles of the legendary 1930s generation.

¹ "After 1973-74, Fassianos's 'painterly' works, i.e., those in which colour is the dominant element, are either flat or with some depth, depending on the light source. When the light comes from behind the object, its outline is sharper and it looks flatter." E. Agathonikou in Fassianos, 45 Years of Creation, S. G. Zachariades Collection, exhibition catalogue, Municipality of Rhodes Modern Greek Art Museum, 2009, p. 24.
² See Alecos Fassianos, Athlos, Mythos, Eros [in Greek], Kastaniotis editions, Athens 2004, p. 82.
³ As quoted in B. Kalamaras, "Bicycling Forever" [in Greek], Eleftherotypia daily, April 21, 2004.