Jannis Spyropoulos Collection
In the works of the collection housed at the J. Spyropoulos Museum the visitor has the opportunity to follow the artist's artistic career throughout his long career.
Setting off from the earliest stage of his paintings, which were mainly figurative depictions, two sub-categories and periods emerged: the first one being referred to as the “grey brushstroke” (1940-1948) and the other one as the “vertical brushstroke” (1949-1950). These were followed by a period of “naive vision” with landscape paintings painted in a large number of variations.
In the works from the period 1952-1957 can be clearly seen the procedures that Spyropoulos adopted in order to arrive at Abstraction, through the transcendence of the naturalistic object.
Examples of the way the painter developed the freedom of his line through the use of pictorial gesture are evident in the works from 1957 and onwards. These examples constitute the epitome of all his quests during this period as they re-introduce purely geometrical shapes and incisions in an endeavor to bring a unique blend of the intensity of gestures with the calm poise of tectonic organisation.
During the Sixties the artist, with unusual intuition, held in check the chance processes taking place in the interior of his images and harmonized the expressivity of the content with his technical uniqueness. The method of affixing of painting materials adopted by Spyropoulos, managed to encapsulate and assimilate the various textures into a uniform surface (both aesthetically and materially).
During the period when most of his contemporaries throughout the world were trying to find a way out of the limits imposed by two dimensions, and from the canvas itself, our own abstract classicist was “refining” his canvas through unremitting intervention. No layer of the surface contended with the preceding one. On the contrary, it assisted it, constantly bringing forth hidden qualities.
The compositions from the period 1965-1974 were based on three primary elements, which were the incisions, collage techniques and brushstrokes. The painter made use of earthen colours, where the value of the luminosity was drawn into their interior, then transformed into warmth and finally functioned as a catalyst for dramatic painterly occurrences which are demonstrated by a inventive technique employed in the final polishing of each painting.
The collage technique which was applied so assiduously by J. Spyropoulos already during the Sixties, with the marginal assimilation of the foreign body within the uniform substance of the painting itself, continued to be used in the period 1976-1987, with undiminished inventiveness. The painter refined his paintings layer by layer, enclosing within them qualities which constituted the matires of the modelling and permitted the emergence of the interior landscapes which demand a sensitive viewer in order to be fully revealed.
In this final period Spyropoulos made greater use of “readable” fragments of printed image. He left recognisable parts of photographs which were skilfully “tied in” with the "spirit" and the structure of the total composition. In this way a dialogue was created between what pre-existed and what in the end by means of his personal refinements becomes significant. A method of reading is promoted where what has been seen a thousand times becomes novel again, because these things are brought to the fore and redefined.
