Footnotes

EXHIBITED:
Sydney, Australia, David Jones' Art Gallery, Jannis Spyropoulos, Paintings 1969-71, November 9-27, 1971, no. 16.

LITERATURE:
Y. Papaioannou, The Work of the Painter Yannis Spyropoulos, doctoral dissertation, Athens 1994, no. 1067, p. 304.


Prefacing Spyropoulos's 1971 one-man show in Sydney, Australia which included this outstanding picture, art critic C. Spencer noted: "The first thing to be said about these paintings is that they are extremely beautiful to look at, avoiding any obvious effort to charm, any easy seduction by sensuous colour or gaiety of mood. Inherent in their beauty, which is at once immediate and at the same time evasive, is superb craftsmanship. What may first appear as areas of monochrome colour are in fact brilliant, painstaking technical achievements, the work of a master painter who works with love and conviction. His dark canvases are like veils moving slowly and sensuously in the wind, revealing here a brief shaft of light, there a sharp burst of sun, an unexpectedly brilliant colour, textures of ancient stones and crumbling walls. Areas of great calm are disturbed by elements of tension and conflict. There is excitement and drama alongside simple acceptance. It is as if we are been given glimpses into the fascinating mystery of life through the equally mysterious processes of artistic creation."¹

A recurrent sign in Spyropoulos's work, which features prominently in Synthessis M, is the circle, or ring, a universally accepted symbol of eternity and never-ending existence. In ancient religions, the circle represented the unity and wholeness of life and the relationship between man and nature. From the age-old symbol of the ouroboros (the serpent eating its own tail) to the Renaissance idea of the circular temple, the ring remains a projection of the archetypal image of the unconscious on the material world. In Christian art it represents eternal union, divine perfection and everlasting life.<sup>2

1</sup>. C. Spencer, preface to the Yannis Spyropoulos - Paintings 1969-71 exhibition at the David Jones' Art Gallery in Sydney, November 9-17, 1971.
². See Y. Papaioannou, Yannis Spyropoulos – Monograph [in Greek], doctoral dissertation, Yannis and Zoe Spyropoulos Foundation, Athens 2010, pp. 292-293; G. Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art, Oxford University Press, New York 1961, p. 153, 178.