Reference to the painting "After the snow", 1996
Yannis Adamakos is a maître of lyrical, expressionist, gestural abstraction. This artist in his early works, taking the human body as his starting-point with striking distorting interventions in the figures, arrived at a personal idiom of expressionism, and then gradually went over to an abstractive process in an almost monochrome, inward painting which gives expression to suggestive, fleeting impressions. From time to time he has been fascinated by artists such as Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Rothko, and Pollock, with whose work he has been engaged in an open, frank dialogue. His entirely personal created work lies within the development of experiences, innovations, and movements, such as action painting, informel, tachism, abstract expressionism.
In Reference to the Work 'After the Snow', of 1996, the relations between colour and space are articulated on terms of structures which give rise to an illusion of depth by the creation of rhythms of form and space. The diaphanous and natural space is also created by a release of energy filled with the dynamism of movement. The relation between reality and illusion is mediated through an expression of sensibility, lyricism, and inwardness. All this carefully concealed world, beneath a phantasmagoria of transparency and reflections, is a magical world, breathtakingly beautiful and unexpected, an invisible world which merely hints at its existence. The denseness of the colour, corresponding fully to the density of nature, is interrupted by diaphanous, luminous surfaces. Bright clearings, fragments of masses, and linear forms activate the illusory, imaginary character of the space. The result is a combination of instinct, spontaneity, and intellectual control.
