Portrait of Tatiana A., 2002
Born in 1963 in Kosmas Kynourias; lives and works in Athens. Studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Panayiotis Tetsis and Yannis Valavanidis (1982–7); he went on to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Leonardo Cremonini (1988–91) on a Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation scholarship and a P. Bakala Bros Foundation grant. He worked at Apopsi Cultural Centre (1996–2002). Since 2002, he has been teaching painting at Simio Art Group. In 2001, he received the Academy of Athens Award for Young Painters; in 2006, he received an Honourable Mention from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. Since his first solo exhibition in 1988, he has had an ongoing collaboration with Medusa Art Gallery in Athens. His work is in public and private collections
In Portrait of Tatiana A., of 2002, on the left-hand end of the familiar battered couch in his studio, sits Tatiana Averoff, daughter of Evangelos Averoff - psychologist, writer, and Director of the Evangelos Averoff Gallery at Metsovo. The space on the right, floor and wall, is disproportionately bare, but with allusive indications of life: behind the couch there is a night-table with half-open drawers. What is striking is the ease of the artist in giving away the sources of his inspiration and the influences on him. The half-open drawers in the corner probably are derived from the influence of Gaston Bachelard, and hint at the hiding-place of absolutely hidden, inner secrets. The drawers, moreover, create a second space within the space and are a small tribute on the part of the artist to Chardin. The female figure in Rorris's picture is flanked on the wall behind by photographs particularly charged with meaning. A photograph of a work by Pantazis, a special favourite of her father's, a black-and-white photograph of her newly-wed parents, a photograph of Tatiana, Metsovo in snow, a small nineteenth-century engraving from the painter's studio, and, at the other end, discreetly, a photograph of her father when he was young, as if presiding over the whole of this. And we come to the figure: seated on the left-hand end of the couch, with her right hand slackly resting on its arm, and the left hand contracted, as if scratching it. The artist has wished to give an ambivalent dimension to the interpretation of the portrait. On the young woman's lips a scarcely perceptible smile of condescension and as if looking down on things from on high appears. As the neck is tilted slightly backwards, the head is caught in a backward movement, exposing the throat, as if the model were looking at the beholder from above. The psychologist Tatiana Averoff, in direct 'art therapy', on the couch of Yorgos Rorris.
Τhe work was created for the exhibition 'Sketching out Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday. Young Greek Artists: A tribute to Prefecture of Yiannena".' held at the Averoff Museum of Modern art, at Metsovo in 2002.
