A Vineyard in Different Seasons, 2019
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 horizontal arrangement against a dark background of various shades, Yannis Adamakos develops planes, mainly in green, red, and orange, in varying lines, more horizontal than vertical, and embossed points and dots. Out of the dark substrate emerge bright green and red forms that animate the composition. The colours are light and dark green, such as the colour of vine, and English red. Yannis explains his technique in detail: While painting, he creates a sort of a painted frame, with neon-like fluorescence and an orange shade, which reflects light and adds a complementary colour. In essence, Adamakos captures an abstract landscape of a vineyard, with the vines and their supports lined up. In the individual works, he conveys in abstract compositions the life cycle of the vine, from planting, growth, production of grapes and ripening to deterioration.
The sparse, abstract compositions, combined with the pronounced materiality of the brushwork, along with the artist’s commitment to monochromatic treatment and a specific tonality, are some of the outstanding qualities of his paintings. In order to capture the lines of vines, he makes sharp abrasions on the panel surface by scraping them off using glass. By removing the paint paste, these abrasions look like sprigs of vine. The idea of the violent detachment of paint was apparently prompted by the use of a wood panel.
The work was created especially for the group anniversary exhibition “Lands of Creation, A tribute to Metsovo”, which was inaugurated at the E. Averoff Museum of Modern Art in 2019.
