The Red Circle

The increasingly intense, abstract and simplified renderings of Greece’s island landscape reflect the gradual turn of Jannis Spyropoulos to abstraction in the 1950s. His compositions from the late ‘50s, with their free-flowing, dynamic brushstrokes and limited colors, as well as those from his next period, reflect a life of endless investigation, experimentation and exploration. His works become a self-signified and self-contained world, indicate paths that lead from darkness to the light, evoke new codes of communication and the images of an alternative reality, one that is poetic and dramatic, spiritual and mystical, corresponding directly to psychological and emotional states, as well as to the artist’s wider concerns and particular sensitivity to modern conditions.