070. TSAROUCHIS Yiannis (1910-1989)

‘Eros’ 1972

Signed dated & dedicated mixed media on brown paperboard 45×60 cm

€ 2.500 – 3.500

With a particularly tender grasp of reality, the artist wholly and accurately captures the transformation of the external model into a visual entity. White pastel is used to shape and structure the volumes; it tends towards beautification, eerie clarity and purity, adding an idealistic poetry and a tinge of idealism which raises the model into a metaphysical realm of fantasy of angels and cherubs. The artist’s attraction to the male body is evident on the one hand, yet so is, on the other, his will to transcend it. Thus the division between expression and faithful reproduction becomes apparent. The ascetic aesthetics of compositional austerity constitute Tsarouchis’ greatest artistic virtue and here serving his generation’s quest to fuse modernism and localism; the painter’s aesthetic split between East and West is evident, and combines with the Byzantine-Folk visual language inevitably leading to schematizations; the model’s design fidelity is violated ultimately leading to a recreation of the form which integrates it into the flat surface.

PROV. Priv.coll. Athens