35. 35AR YANNIS TSAROUCHIS (1910-1989) Art & décoration

Description

35. 35AR YANNIS TSAROUCHIS (1910-1989) Jeune homme signé en grec et daté « 28-8-77 (en bas à gauche) huile sur toile 96 x 55,5 cm. (37.8 × 21.9 in.) Provenance D. Fotopoulos collection, Athens. Private collection, Athens. Conveying a sense of monumentality, composed immobility, and serene ethos, Tsarouchis's signature male subject carries on the classical man-centred humanist ideal, while at the same time capturing the confident spirit of contemporary life. Here, although the image of his young sitter is unmistakably identified as a youth from the 1970s, firmly anchored to the here and now, the white costume wings fastened to his shoulders, suggest an everlasting world liberated from the fleeting moment. With the quality and wisdom of his art, Tsarouchis managed to invest an everyday image with a symbolic value and transform a youth posing in his studio into a saint of a modern pantheon. As noted by Nobel laureate O. Elytis "Tsarouchis restored the human body in a land whose age-old civilisation has always been man-centred. Thanks to his paintings, the figures of Hermes, Narcissus, St. Georgios and St. Dimitrios started to live and breathe again and circulate among us."1 Distilled with marvellous restraint and captured in pure, frugal forms highlighted by solid outlines and confident brushwork, Tsarouchis's long-haired youth is imbued with an atmosphere of pensive serenity and grace, echoing the artist's earlier Thinker series, while the low vantage point lends a sense of reserved authority and lofty stature. The simplified design, pronounced linearity, genuineness of character and purity of form are also reminiscent of Fayum portraiture, which was a major source of inspiration for Tsarouchis in his effort to reinterpret the age old tradition of Greco-Roman and Byzantine art in a modern and vigorous manner. 1 : O. Elytis, preface to the Yannis Tsarouchis: Fifteen Works and One Original Print 1938-1963 album [in Greek], 1964.