Municipal Gallery of Athens, Lithuanian Art Museum   EXHIBITION Greek Presidency 2003 "Lanitis and Mihas: Two Aspects of the Abstract" in Lithuania  Vilnius Picture Gallery (Str. Didzioji, Vilnius, Lithuania) 27 03 2003  - 25 04 2003 VIRTUAL EXHIBITION  Lanitis and Mihas: Two Aspects of the Abstract  I part   (GIANNIS MICHAS)  II part   III part    IV part   V part  (KIKOS LANITIS)   GIANNIS  MICHAS GIANNIS MICHAS. 1995,  lacquered wood and bronze, 120x120  GIANNIS MICHAS. 1995,  lacquered wood and bronze, 120x120

A FEW WORDS ON MY WORK  Giannis Michas Setting out from the intention to organize my works on the basis of geometrical elements, simple or complex - to the immediate expressive abilities of which I believe - I use the most simple regular figures, for example the circle, the quadrangle etc. Following my need to investigate their mutual relations on a smooth surface, formed upon a ruler-canvas of drawn harmonious analogies, I have begun to study these problems a few years ago. Taking a rectangle of the golden mean or the corresponding quadrangle, I employ it as a field where I study the relations between my figures and the harmonious drawings, of the golden mean ago. So I create horizontal lanes, upon which I compose the geometrical figures horizontally and vertically. I also pursue the chromatic harmonization of the complementary colours or of the tonal alternations of a single colour with the drawings (1968-1972). Later, laying aside the smooth surface, I study its role in space, by either giving to it a wavy shape or creating projections and incisions of the lanes. Here the complementary colours give place to the white colour that enables the study of the falling shadows and the optic integration of the "birth" of the form from the surface (1973-1974). Following their evolutionary course, the forms and the geometrical elements emerge in space as bas-reliefs in the beginning and later as sculptures (1975-1976). With the creation of these sculptures, my attention turns to the study of the surface, upon which they will be posed. So, on the basis of the harmonious drawings and analogies that gave birth to these sculptures, I shape the surface that will receive them. Beside the coloured wood that I use as a material for my constructions, I also employ aluminium and bronze for the sculptures, exploiting their impeccably smooth and lustrous surface as an element of constructive perfection. Later (1977-1978) the colour and the metals give place to the smooth and completely white surface, where the lines (light and shadow), which are created as I place fine surfaces one upon the other, are the only expressive elements. In this phase my work begins to co-operate directly with architecture: consequently, as the dimensions of my works become much bigger, they are not portable anymore and they have to be constructed directly upon the surface they have been studied for. The materials I use here are building materials (concrete, marble etc.). In this recent work, I aspire to organize a surface in relation to architecture and to the surrounding space. In the early eighties I start to organize my work in unities, each time with another subject, e.g.. "Imprints" or "Meshwork and Imprints"; I now employ materials that I find in trade - for instance fence netting - and I create portable works and works for the wall. Later, in 1986, I work on a great unity, titled "Ambiguity"; The essential material is here stainless sheeting, upon which I paint my geometrical figures with an air-brush. After a long period, during which the materials I used, were wood, metal or building material, like concrete, marble or netting for reinforced concrete, I decided to return to an old love, namely oil on canvas: so, from 1990 to 1996 I have created a series of works in two unities, titled "Quadrangle - Variations" and "Accessions". This six-year-period of my return to the canvas and the oil, has shown to me from a different angle the hard materials I have been using till then. Consequently, in 1997, employing the black sheeting as a basic material, but using intense colours this time (air-brush), I create a unity with the subject "Geometrical Landscapes". The sequels of this unity are the twenty works of my last production (1999-2000) with black sheeting and bronze, titled "Dialogues". THE DURABLE CHARM OF GEOMETRY   Nelli Kyriazi, Curator of the Municipal Gallery of Athens The first works of the exhibition have been created in 1968 and they signify the outset of Giannis Michas to a decade, where the History of Art has located a posteriori the end of Modern An. In a perfect contrast to the international current of artistic phenomena, Greece, abandoning older rigidities and certain inhibitions of nationalistic character from the times between the wars, embraces modernism in this period with an immense time divergence, and it is characteristic that, at least in the beginning, a great part of the artists focus their interest on abstraction. In the first decades of the 20th century Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malewich have functioned rather as Utopian Messianic heralds than as artists-iconoclasts. Mondrian's expectation of a beauty sensation that is relieved from the object and able to reborn this materialistic society, and Malewich's enthusiasm for suprematism that did not simply try to interpret the world, but to create a new model of its appearance, were only visions and they remained impracticable in this sphere. Nevertheless, they influenced the art of this century, as they promoted a different representation of reality in a revolutionary manner. The world without an object (Die gegenstandslose Welt, Bauhausbiicher 1927), the manifesto of abstract art, was left as a motto and, no doubt, as a founding idea and attitude for the movement's posterity to use and to exploit. Geometry and constructivism, the rational facets of abstraction Michas has chosen for his expressive needs, were perfectly interwoven towards the end of the sixties with the avant-garde tendencies of Greek art - at least as regards the form-moulding formulations - in an artistic climate that was impatient to regain the lost time. This choice, however, has proved in retrospect to be stable and temperamental, as far as he still follows its difficult and labouring course with remarkable consistency. In his early activity, the artist mobilizes the principles of geometry and organizes by means of the harmonious drawings the painting surface of his work on a canvas, where he juxtaposes two diametrically opposite figures, the circle and the quadrangle, at first horizontally and then vertically. The pursuit of the harmony of the opposites is obvious as well as the invention of a way of visual communication with a synthetic puzzle of curvilinear and rectilinear figures and the support of complementary colours or tonal graduations of one and the same colour. The interest, of course, is signalled in advance in these works and concerns the tendency of the arrangements to release themselves from the designated surface and the possibility of their evolution in space. Geometry - even painting - cannot function after Mondrian in a fragmen- tary way, especially if it does not cover thematic pretences. Its asceticism is substantiated when its potential intervenes in space in a functionalistic manner. Until 1974 Michas promotes the experimentation in this direction, either by fragmenting the unity of the field in two-fold and three-fold compositions, or by transforming its plane to a wavy curve or, finally, by interrupting the pictorial coherence of his figures with projections as well as with inlaid material; aluminium, natural or painted wood, steel and bronze -natural or chromium-plated- substitute the painting matter, but mainly they support the employment of certain constructive concepts that the artist tries out from 1975 to 1978. This painting action as it is or coupled with non-painting material, is abandoned during this phase. Michas appears now ready to compose his personal involvement in the evolutionary course of historicism that would seem blind and petrified without the necessary modernizing remoulding. His experience from the previous studies is employed methodically in wall relieves or in small sculptures, gestated by the initial ruler-canvas, yet at the same time autonomous and three-dimensional through the geometrical moulding of their mass in bronze or aluminium and the transparent support ofplexiglas. His work reaches its peak, however, in those series of wall relieves with white lacquered plywood (1977-1978). Any material that might suggest here the presence of the unnecessary has been removed. Through the subsequent layers of thin planes upon the surface, the form emerges conversing with the sensitive and constantly replenished relations of light and shadow. The expressive eloquence of clarity arises, thus, as an amazing result of a gradual process of augmenting the existent power of abstraction by its rating in the limits of the minimum. At the same time, one detects in this series the first signs of the artist's opportune turn to the world of senses, to the emotion or to the potential participation of the spectator, which can be traced until today in his personal code of communication. Since the eighties, the unity of his writing is apportioned suitably among small thematic nuclei of realistic or figurative titles. "Imprint", "Meshwork-Imprint" (1979-1983) / "Ambiguities" (1984-1986) / "Quadrangle - Variations" / "Accessions" (1990-1996) / "Geometrical landscapes" (1997-1998) / "Dialogues" (1999-2000). The omnipresent geometry sometimes with its loud manifestations, sometimes discreetly auxiliary, runs through the multiformity of his investigations as a link of coherence and as an expressive co-ordinate, not in an obsessive self-sufficiency. At the same time the artist initiates boldly non-artistic materials and means - card-board, fence netting, stainless sheeting, air-brush painting - incorporating their useful parameters in his investigation scope, which reminds us the pioneer architectpainter Takis Marthas, as well as his indisputable contribution to this direction, already since the fifties. The experimentation of Michas with the materials becomes even more interesting in the cases that their self-sufficiency of use expands to symbolism - unities "Imprints", "Meshwork-Imprint" - or to a particular signification - unity "Ambiguities" - to which the artist came to after having exhausted all the possibilities of the preceding research. A more general characteristic of his work is the lack of hurry from one step to the next. The initial ideas of the imprints with geometrical layers of cardboard, which he paints by means of an airbrush and then removes, is transferred to the "Meshwork" too and from there to the "Ambiguities" and to the "Crosses". Although the tools and the stages of the process - materials, shape, structure or redefinition of the character of the space - appear at first sight not homogenous, they converge finally as a result of a predetermined intervention of the artist but also of the unexpected activity of external factors: the constant imprint of the netting upon the surface co-operates with the netting-object itself as well as with its fluctuating shadow, while the fleeting reflection of the spectator and the haphazard changes of the surrounding space are projected upon the metal mirrors of the "Ambiguities". The works balance between sensation and illusion, truth and delusion, between the constant and the ephemeral, with vague interpretations and an obvious speculation - indicative of Michas' choice to enforce his action even on the walls of the exhibition space, timing the end of its function with the expiration of the exhibition, what we should rather call an extrovert and "social" phase of his work. In the early nineties Michas goes from the structural ranges of ensembles over to a monist elaboration of the profit of his experience. The parallel return to the ritual of the painting negotiation of the subject "Quadrangle - Variations" with old materials - oil, canvas - reveals the tendency to subordinate his writing to a stricter control and discipline. By removing the quadrangle from its organic embodiment in the ruler-canvas of his early work (1968-1973), by constructing and painting its shadows and their outlines, he personifies it in countless "portraits" of chromatic variations with its transformation to an autonomous, leading image, and, of course, it is not accidental that in the further stages of his study during the nineties, the concept of hanging his works on the wall is maintained and enriched by various versions of material as well as by notional support. In the "Accessions" for instance - oil on canvas - the registration of the subsequent formations of an object's bulk - in this case an embossed geometrical element of coloured wood - is promoted by its intrusion in the flat surface of the form, while in the "Geometrical Landscapes", on the contrary, the artist underlines emphatically the possibility of evident lyrical developments of a purely rational dialect and he keeps on documenting the constant proposition of transgression of a static model of reading in the literal or metaphorical "Dialogues" of his geometrical figures on black sheeting, the most recent outcome of his research, The wall coherence of the imprinting of his drastic interventions during the last year is interrupted by a great series of sculptural "Crosses" (1995-1996). The cross section, a fundamental element in its primary form in Malewich's suprematism, is transferred by Michas constructively in the space in multiform synthetic repetitions and variations of formal relations, supported by the impeccable clarity of natural or chromium-plated brass. These works of frugal power, constantly released from religious signification, impose their monumental prospect, as they evolve in the three dimensions of the space, and seem to respond fully to the lingering, arduous questions of the artist. Michas went beyond the end of the century on the same vehicle he set out with, and this should be granted to him as a token of persistence, consistency, concentrated research and inventive adaptation. In a time of vagueness, unjustifiable noise and, sometimes, of bad taste - everything is allowed in the name of the post-modernthis retrospective exhibition of Giannis Michas at the Municipal Gallery of Athens is suggested as a "cure" with its silent order, with the certitude it emits and its balance between rationality and sensation. BIBLIOGRAPHY   Mavrommatis Emmanuel, The System of process and. the forms in the work of Giannis Michas, Athens 1974. Lydakis Stellios, Lexicon of Greek painters and. engravers (16th - 20th century), Athens 1976. Xydis Alexandros, Propositions for the history of Modern Greek Art, Athens 1976. Christou Chrysanthos, From the painting of the generation between the wars, Thessaloniki 1977. Spiteris Tonis, Three centuries of Modem Greek art: 1660 -1967, Athens 1979. Doumani Mariella, From the space of the absolute to the sphere of dreams, exhibition catalogue, Athens 1982. Vakalo Eleni, The features of post-war art in Greece, 4th V., After the abstraction, Athens 1985. Doumani Mariella, Double work, exhibition catalogue, Athens 1987. Kowalska Bozena, exhibition catalogue, Athens 1987. Mavrommatis Emmanuel, exhibition catalogue, Athens 1990 Koscielak Elzbieta, The richness of geometry, exhibition catalogue, Thessaloniki 1993 Vakalo Eleni, Review of plastic arts, Athens 1996. Adamopoulou Areti, Artistic interventions in space. Suggestions of the Greek post-war art. Dissertation (typed), Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki 1997. Papanikolaou Miltiadis, Greek Art of the 20th century. Painting - Sculpture, Athens 1999. Christou Chrysanthos, Lexicon of Greek Artists. Painters - Sculptors - Engravers, Athens 1999. *** Eleni Vakalo, 1973:   In G. Michas' work the composition leans upon the employment of the two elementary figures, of the quadrangle and of the circle, which immediately impose by their contrast their harmonious arrangement in space as an essential pursuit. So, the points of their location in the surface, their distances, their analogies, namely the relations set up in space by the divisions that the interjections of the figures create, compose substantially the main terms of harmony. G. Michas follows their various interpretations systematically. First with regular divisions in horizontals, then with the interposition of new vertical incisions and with the interchange of the factors of their relations. The same persistent investigation of the harmonious rules he also applies in the colour, watching the development of tonal graduations or the quantitative alterations of complementary relations. In his last works he adds projections and incisions that create new, changing factors of flash graduation, of shadow shifting, of developing optic completion of the shape by the shifting of the spectator etc. In the persistent and systematic investigating way of G. Michas we recognize the expression of sensitivity that finds in this direction its equivalent in the precision (the precision of composition and construction that distinguishes his works is characteristic) and in the distinction of the effect that the slightest alteration or shifting of the elements of the figure has upon the qualitative result of the work of art.   *** Tonis P.Spkeris, 1974:   Michas' last works, though they differ from the previous ones, they retain, however, the same coherence in the conception. Indeed, he still deals, with the same speculation: to organize the work on a geometrical canvas of drawings, but rendering at the same time a sculptural interpretation to the figures. This is the result of a circle, already announced by his painting and his relieves. It is the inevitable accomplishment of the suggestions he has already brought up in his previous work, where he tried to exploit the various combinations of the circle, of the quadrangle and of the rectangle on surfaces with harmonious drawings. So, he formed horizontal and vertical lanes, upon which the various combinations acted. In a more advanced stage, he felt the necessity to "objectify" the optical illusion of plasticity that the painted surfaces offer, namely to make the figures themselves real. And then he arrives to the series of the wavy relieves and of the works with incisions and lanes of material (wood or metal). The complementary colours he has used until then give place to the pure white colour that enables the play of the projected shadow and brings out the form distinctly from the surface. And now Michas presents the conclusions of this circle of work. The sculptural completion abolishes the optical illusion and underlines the clarity of the artist's spirit. An Aristotelian spirit, where the feeling is not absent and the intervention of the man and artisan is revealed in the working of the metal (bronze or aluminium) and of the coloured wood. The impeccable surfaces live a life of their own, between the flickering of the light and the interior balance of the harmonious drawings. In this difficult course, full of traps, Michas has managed to give a personal character to his work that promises a lot in the future.   *** Charles Spencer, 1978: It was long obvious that Michas was working in the direction of clear, minimalist methods, which express and investigate the feeling that "the least is the most". The previous work of Michas, during the sixties, was perceptibly chromatic, but gradually the colour became much less and he used instead the shadows from the relief elements that were employed for the sake of emotion and drama. The stressing was achieved by the use of bronze and stainless metal, as they created a feeling of richness in the strict frugality. Michas is experimenting with the interior of the central hall of Desmos that also represents the main sense of his recent exhibition. A white, sparkling, almost "clinical" space - this puritan and minimalist atmosphere has been accepted and adopted by the artist. The embossed surfaces and the two bold compositions in the gallery are bare and refined, without extensions or colourful metals; they depend completely for the fine dancing of light and shadow. In any case the dialogue consists in two series of "voices": a compact and graduated shadow, a clear and hazy light, in a fleeting counterpoint - if I may borrow the music term. *** Efi Strouza, 1979: The work ofMichas is classified obviously in a line of research that analyzes the "action and the result" in a mutual dialectical relationship, as well as the degree, with which the action influences the result and the degree, with which the result influences the action from the point of the initial conception up to the fertilization of this interaction. It reveals the permanent interaction of powers that destabilize the permanence of one and only code for the reading, the recognition and the function of a piece of work. What Weiner calls "action and retro-action", "effect and affect", "under and over" in the semantic and verbal space of his research, is nothing but bringing up to the surface the paradox of the oppositions and contradictions that exist in one action, in the code system of one way of perceiving meanings and expressions, suggesting their reduction to other points, to other codes. The possibility of the many-sided reading - total, partial, extended, one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional etc. - of the combinations of Michas is not only due to the existence of these granted structural facts, but also to the conception of their affect on surfaces, in space, in relation to the presence of the eye. The action is everywhere diffuse and rises from points, which are not directly visible or perceptible, which investigate in all directions and turn with the same intensity to their mutual alternative relations as well as to their relation with the entirety of the animate and inanimate surroundings. Michas' course of research becomes, thus, perceptible as a series of steps on a particular line of planning that approaches a particular aim, yet at the same time every step implies actions and transformations that mark his work with the same important and formative way and coexist like organic parts of the whole expressive form of the work's function. Every step heads to a point of reference, but every step is also a trace that curves mentally and substantially the whole action of expression.   *** Mariella Doumani, 1982:   In order to approach pure harmony, Giannis Michas proceeded with consequent abstractions, and at the end all that remained was a minimal trace. At the threshold of perfection, life has lost its exuberance. An almost absolute immobility is juxtaposed to the turmoil. Only a minimal rhythm pervades each work. A trace of life that exists and waits as if in hibernation. Tenderness, sensitivity, creative elevations, repressed deep inside, remain in a drowse so as to protect themselves from coarseness and ugliness. Only in dreams, in symbols, can they emerge without leaving the drowse, to make their presence perceptible, without risking to collide with reality. In the last phase of his work, Giannis Michas transported the harmonious drawings from the space of the absolute to the sphere of dreams. Wrapped in the nebula of a faint colour, the geometrical elements change their substance, they throw off the restrictions of the material in order to move free in the dreamy firmament.   *** Vearriki Spiliadi, 1984:   The speculation and the materials Michas used until his last exhibition offered a lustre and a perfection to those constructions that functioned like architectural pans in the space. In the unity "Meshwork - Imprint", a completely new element is introduced in this composed artistic work. One could say a dramatic element, an inclination to expand the expressive language of the artist, in order to say more about himself and his social surroundings. Using for the first time a base material (the ready-made fence netting), he gives to it symbolic dimensions. Netting - a psychological social or political element that traps and blocks the horizons. The spaces he shapes, interfering in the exhibition hall itself - the netting being on the wall, vertical to it or in a completely vertical development like a sculpture - are lit suitably, enabling the artist to exploit the shadows in a plastic manner or to paint over the netting, the walls, the floor. The intervention, the base material, and its symbolification offer new possibilities and outlets in this work, guiding it eventually to bolder plastic explorations of the space, to more dramatic and expressionistic "environments".   *** Bozena Kowalska, 1987:   In his last work Michas has begun to use chromium plated sheeting with a mirror character. The metal meshwork, as a completely material element eventually, vanishes from the sheeting. Nevertheless, its imprint remains. It is white, and a tiny part of it is painted intensely red or blue. The chromium plated sheeting is painted sometimes regionally, and the white meshwork is designed in the background of the vivid colour. The artist also creates drawings of great beauty on the basis of these very stimuli of the meshwork and of its imprint. Those, however, remain unalterable, when the images on the sheeting undergo continuous changes, according to what is reflected in its surface. This is another way of the artist to express himself and one of his most important creative attempts too. Here is included his speculation concerning the interchange of the phenomena and their illusions, the limits between the existing and the non-existing and the illusion that the limit of existence provokes, but also the various qualitative categories that become imperceptible under the influence of time or of the surroundings. *** Maria Kotzamani, 1987:   Under the general title "Ambiguity", Giannis Michas presents a nice unity of works that define accurately the development his work has followed in the framework of his personal course. Starting from the principles of an absolutely methodical and organized thought, the artist now attempts an expansion of his artistic field, guiding his research on new paths of form-moulding materialization. The voluntary refraining of the construction from any impulsive process, the rational austerity and the restrictive frugality of the colour range that marked his previous work, have guided the artist consequently to the pursuit of a new plastic correlation, releasing gradually his work from the dependence of typical reason... .. .At the same time, the relations between the visible and the imaginary, the existing and the fictitious, the reality and the illusion, that functioned symbolically, gain now an autonomous function, abolishing all the restrictive barriers: the lustrous surfaces of stainless steel compose a registration field of the plastic space, but also a reflection field of the real phenomena, leading to various transformations, according to the living reality that is projected upon them, and attracting all the effective intensity that lies in them. The man, the surrounding space, the conception of the fleeting and the secret vagueness of the fragmentary mark by their presence the experience of the sensation as they split the austere geometry of the composition. The organized reality of the plastic space is completed by the interference of the real, creating a situation that is "starically" indefinite and therefore extremely poetical...   *** Emmanuel Mavrommatis, 1990:   From the object - the geometrical concepts - the artist has passed to the study of the images, as if they were self-sufficient objects. His passing from the object to the image is the substantial change of his work in the last years. It is the period that has preceded his present, last creations, where the artist has definitely chosen to work with the image as an object or with the fictitious management of its imaginary object. The artist has returned to the cell of the previous meshwork, namely to the quadrangle, that functions as the initial unit of the combinative relations between those units and the way they are posed and they function upon a surface. The artist returns, through the endless variations, to the initial subject of his work, namely to the quadrangle, but not recurring as before, as a part of a series, but on the contrary, as an element to be combined with series of endless possibilities. With these works of his that permit - more than the others - multiple interpretations of the arranging manner and of the classification of the depicted units (quadrangle) between themselves, the artist has given in a certain way either a poetical dimension to the austerity of his initial intuition, as regards the treatment of geometry, or he has tried to use geometry in an exclusively form-moulding manner. The image functions in his creations more arbitrary than before and tends to suggest itself as a genuine discovery by his observation of the surrounding space, without special reference to the conditions it arises from. *** Alexandros Xydis, 1991:   After his experiments with the reflecting metal surfaces, with the metal meshwork and the monochrome, Michas returns to the colour, rather he tries it, as far as I know, for the first time, submitting to its fascination with these chromatic variations of the subject of the quadrangle. In his work, the quadrangle is always an essential figure that does not permit countless quotations without coating, or many illuminations. Here the light, always falling from the left, produces a netting of shadows and an illusion that the quadrangles with the jagged sides are embossed, as they seem to protrude from the canvas. From these shadows start the colour lines, arranged in equally wide brush-strokes, advancing from the dark to the light, until all of them die out in the always light coloured and monochrome background, where only the traces of the brush-stroke can be distinguished. The meshwork of the quadrangles - sometimes intersected by a diagonal - creates an abstract representation that risks to end up in a monotone repetition of a simple rhythm. The certainty of the artist's hand lends to the meshwork a cold dryness and a stability that is warmed up only by the rich and succulent colours. The quadrangle, as Michas employs it, is not a necessary proof of his more particular occupation with geometry. It just offers him a composed and simple canvas, so that he can develop his chromatic spectra.   *** Elzbieta Koscielak, 1992:   Giannis Michas follows the path of geometrical rules also in the form-moulding level of the work's existence. This consequence between the internal structure and the external form classifies his work in the field of constructivism and of other geometrical tendencies of the century. Giannis Michas' art is a very personal suggestion, influenced neither by the scientific nor by the expressive address. In the first stage of Giannis Michas' creation, the scientific factor had a certain priority. The modest, minimalist figures and the frugal materials lessen the expressiveness of the art object. Based upon the classical principles, however, his compositions had a secret relation to the "beautiful", to the most classical and most stable value of art. This inclination of the artist towards the "beautiful' directs him to the more free expressive space, without neglecting though the geometrical form of the work. Later, in the eighties, he created the sheeting - mirrors, that in spite of the richness of their expressive means (colour, reflection, natural space, illusion of space etc.) manage to retain the "genetic code" of geometrical art. His last occupation is painting on the canvas. But it would be wrong to think that Giannis Michas just paints geometrical figures. The artist combines once more the elements that for many - rather for the most - artists are incompatible for the structure of an art object. The canvas of the frame is not coated with colour in its complete surface, so that the geometrical figures do not identify themselves with genuine painting, but they "visit" temporarily the surface of the painting. Besides, the colour play does not mention the details of the hues, but stresses the expressive relations of the basic or of the complementary colours. The active presence of the background lends another dimension. The spectator has not the impression of simply painted geometrical figures, but the sense of expressive geometrical abstraction, expressed in the present case by painting means. Giannis Michas' work is the example of development of geometrical abstraction, without the risk that the abandoning of the course of orthodox minimalism may destroy the concept of geometrical art. Giannis Michas guides us to the marginal regions of the bipolar relationship of richness and modesty in art.   TRANSLATION: Giorgos Depastas Publications from the Catalogue of GIANNIS MICHAS Exhibition "Harmonious drawings". Municipal Gallery of Athen, 2001

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION  Lanitis and Mihas: Two Aspects of the Abstract  I part    (GIANNIS MICHAS)  II part   III part   IV part   V part  (KIKOS LANITIS)

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