Initially it was a new stream of optimism, dominating together with the movement for the victory of Vietnam and at the same time with the pop art movement. The 1967 dictatorship, which found me studying architecture in Milan, abruptly put a brake on the course and plans of many of us. All thought and agony were concentrated there, political action came to the forefront. However, I kept on painting until I got my diploma. Life and art became one with life, it was an identification of body, soul and intellect. I draw with my finger on wood: the vocal cords when screaming, the retina, the brain exploding when serenity is interrupted. I go to Berlin in 1969, I don’t have my own space at the beginning, then I don’t even have time, I stop painting.
In 1980, after 10 years of interruption, I return to painting. I want to keep in my work pictures of the past decade and scenes of our life “in public”. In the setting of the painting and in its form I search for aids from Renaissance, geometry, perspective, the monumental display of the image that I want to associate with the optimistic elements of the pop art and with psychoanalysis: Hunger strikers in the area the National Technical University of Athens, the young boy from Caravaggio in the General Assembly of Coach Building Industry Workers, the Athens Market with songwriter Savvopoulos and the basketball player Giannakis in 1987, Van Gogh with Guttuso and Marylyn, Memories from 1950, after the Greek Civil War, Recollection from Lombardy with Gramsci and the young people in front of the new challenges of history, “El Espolio” in the central Athens square.
