Yannis Kontos
THE DARK WAFT OF AIR AND THE FREEDOM OF THE SKY IN THE PAINTINGS OF DIMITRIS YEROS
This bed of red, how it covers Yeros’s landscapes, as he looks out of his colour window, at the clouds and that volcano in the distance. A black chasm, and a bird trying to give a voice to the silent black. Rose fields and mountains hanker for perfume and kisses. The painter will hunt birds with a net across the nearly blue, surrounded by a landscape of faintly outlined mountains and a lake. The fiery volcano is always there, as if waving a handkerchief to the sky. With his greys, silvers, browns and reds (and variations thereof) Yeros creates a peculiar surrealism which, in his dream, touches on naturalism. And that red bird (with just a touch of black on its feathers), with many smaller birds inside it, brings the world closer. In Yeros’s painting, people run, animals are immovable and landscapes are ever changing, as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Often the blue colour together with a dark green will blow the composition sky-high. Here even the fishes glide through the air. In the background a landscape seeks to enter our lives. A hot-air balloon flies over deserted places, looking proud and beautiful. The artist’s paintings are poems complete with many meanings and allusions. An apple is the world with its shadow, and a sky that is waiting. All of the painter’s doors and windows always lead us to surprises. You could call them dreams, but they are the only absolute reality. Furthermore, this is what Art –and its consolation– is. I would also call the painter erotic, because he transmits this feeling without showing it. How a box with a forest inside it is flying – a composition clearly surrealistic and sparkling. Successive landscapes are swirling around the painter and he calmly captures them on canvas. A kitten over and outside the composition of a painting is looking at the viewer and into the composition: a storm, the sky, a red boat whistling. How the artist leafs through the landscapes, as if reading a children’s book. Because that’s how a child understands the world and plays with it. A red sea over the grass and a house; elsewhere, a red meadow and water and running dreams. Yeros’s trees are not imaginary. If you look at them long enough as part of nature, they will be transformed and lure you to reality.
I shouldn’t forget how Yeros also practises photography with success; it has become his other reality. Of course he is a poet who engages in a back-and-forth with gradations of light. I too walk in Dimitris Yeros’s Art and read our lives, our loves and our imagination, which cannot be contained anywhere.
