Bonhams 1793 : Alecos Fassianos (Greek, born 1935) Foulard aux poissons 200 x 250 cm.

PROVENANCE:
Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens.
M. Komninos collection, Athens.
Bonhams, London, The Greek Sale, 11 June 2002, lot 68.
Private collection, Athens.

EXHIBITED:
Athens, National Gallery, Fassianos Mythologies of Everyday Life, 24 November 2004- 28 February 2005, no 131 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue).

LITERATURE:
Fassianos, Adam Editions, Athens 1990, p. 90-91 (illustrated).
Alecos Fassianos, Ta Nea Publ. - Adam Editions, Athens 2007, p. 52 (illustrated).
P. Cabanne, D.T. Analis, Fassianos, Éditions de la Différence, Paris 2003, p. 117 (illustrated).

Full of life and embraced by the miracle of the Greek light, this quintessential Fassianos captures the eternity of the moment, celebrating the artist's spontaneous delight in graceful and timeless forms, while demonstrating his power to seize the day with creativity, innocence and childhood joy. "The images of summer run through my mind. These ethereal, charming, fleeting images I capture like a fisherman. I weave the nets of my memory; I paint the colours that glow like fish sparkling in the sea."¹

Jean-Marie Drot, former director of the French Academy in Rome, notes that "for Fassianos, the artist's ultimate goal is 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 Just as the fish cannot live except in water, Fassianos cannot live without painting whatever he feels about life, whatever touches him: a foulard waving in the wind or some humble straws on a "low courtyard wall that gives us a sense of identity. The things which attract me are the real things, the things that last forever."³

¹. A. Fassianos, Eikastika magazine, no. 36, December 1984, p. 32.
². J.M. Drot, as quoted in Alecos Fassianos, Athlos, Mythos, Eros [in Greek], Kastaniotis publ., Athens 2004, p. 82.
³. A. Fassianos, The Low Wall, in Today, and Tomorrow and Yesterday [in Greek], Kastaniotis publ., 1990, p. 86.