"Yiannis Fokas is well on his way to the future", stated Sofia Kazazi in her review of the young painter's exhibition at the Kochlias gallery in Thessaloniki in 1983¹. The artist did not fail her expectations: over the next four decades, he would carve out an admirable career with unwavering energy and hard work, becoming one of the most prominent contemporary Greek artists.

"Come in the speaking silence of a dream", writes Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) in her poem Echo. Titled Talking Silence, one of Yiannis Fokas's paintings on view in the City of Athens Art Gallery depicts a man's mouth, perhaps the artist's own, which is integrated into a light-coloured abstract composition consisting of two vertical canvases. Realistically drawn in a manner reminiscent of a charcoal drawing on a third, horizontal canvas, the mouth is the connecting piece, the missing link that unites the two canvases. It's an image within an image, the representational within the abstract, with the former constituting and instantiating the latter. A silence that speaks volumes. In this, the artist's substantial discourse converges with the universal language of painting. Indeed, as this work suggests, Fokas's output oscillates between speech (communication) and silence, tension and tranquillity, the oneiric and the real, ultimately between figuration - the readily identifiable and abstraction, as his works have never been purely representational, nor purely abstract. At its core, this kind of painting focuses on humans and the issues that concern them. Works like Emerald Blue (2016) comment on environmental and migrant issues. Trophies (2015), where the painter juxtaposes the head of John the Baptist with the severed head of a wild boar, refers to ISIS.

Fokas's painting style is not as abstract as it might seem. Although he is generally regarded as a proponent of abstraction, he has never severed ties with realism. He is fascinated by a spontaneous, chaotic creative process, in which a piece takes shape along the way; on other occasions, he uses a preliminary sketch or a model. In a painting from 1985, a radiant human figure dominates the centre of the painting. The pieces he went on to produce feature numbers, which don't always symbolise anything. However, they evoke city walls, traces of graffiti -urban images. At the time, the artist lived semi-permanently in Paris and eagerly photographed the storytelling walls of the City of Light. These gestural works are made using pasted pieces of paper, collages, gauze, spray paint, letterprint, tearings and scratches, materials mounted and torn out. This is a period when he worked a lot with his hands, painting with his fingers, modelling small explosions on the canvas. His paintings, usually large in scale, have no fixed position or direction: they are sometimes arranged vertically and other times horizontally, playing with the viewing angle. The main feature of this kind of painting, however, is its multiplicity, the fact that multiple paintings exist within a single painting.

This quality multiple paintings in a single one becomes evident when focusing on individual details of a piece, either through the naked eye or a camera. A relevant observation by Stéphane Audeguy in his book The Theory of Clouds comes to mind at that moment: "Clouds were riddles, too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud's edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and soon. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore, each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth."² Similarly, the riddle and the infinite exist in Fokas's paintings and define them. Next to heavy relief works, such as the one from 1991 with fragments of brick and tile mounted on the canvas, there are airy, translucent works, such as the one of 2008, featuring large feathers, or the 2018 one with dense and sparse areas,reminiscent of floating forms. Broadly speaking, the artist sometimes plays with earthly and sometimes with celestial qualities, occasionally combining them in a single work. Undoubtedly, the wild expressionism of his works from the 1980s has been tamed over the years, becoming gentler, more contemplative. But the artist's vision has remained the same: the searching examination of the question of 'painting', the analysis of image, structure, surface, and composition.

If painting possesses a skin - as Tériade argues - and toys with it wondrously "to offer us all optical illusions in an unlimited variety over the centuries", then Fokas's paintings function as a second skin. They take into account the avant-garde and embrace the bold experimentations of modernists and postmodernists. The challenge Fokas set to himself was to create to intervene surgically, looking to reconstruct, and to provide a serious proposal for regeneration on the ruptured skin of painting; he did not shy away from shouldering the weighty legacy of his legendary predecessors; and, most importantly, he managed to provide imaginative solutions to the timeless question of painting. This in itself is a great achievement deserving our admiration. We can therefore confidently state that Yiannis Fokas is well on his way to the past - to take a distinct place in the history of painting. 

1. Sofia Kazazi, Yiannis Fokas, Ikastika, Nos 19-20, July-August 1983, p.72
2. Stéphane Audeguy, The Theory of Clouds, Timothy Bent (transl.), Harcourt Ink, Orlando-Austin-New York-San Diego 2005, p. 44.
3. Tériade, The Skin of Art, Skira, Geneva 1948.