Over the space of the approximately ten years of his mature period the work of Yiannis Fokas has covered and concentrated the spirit and the morphoplastic perception of new painting. This perception has been expressed in paradigmatic ways in his work since his painting was first presented in Athens and Paris in 1982 - 1984. The work evolves as an ongoing structural and chromatic intensity during which the artist probes and develops internal complexities, the re-arrangements of sensibility. This work is a point of support for the history of modern, Greek painting. It is characterized, on the one hand, by a juxtaposed arrangement of the elements of the image and, on the other, by the analytical structure of these selfsame elements where each of them is progressively constructed from its interior and from the interior of the one to the other. Finally, the work is characterized by the re-composition of these elements into broader units which emerge from new interventions in the juxtaposed structures. Thus, an overall arrangement is created, determined by the juxtaposition of these broader units. This is the technical description of the ways he works, without which it would not be possible to comprehend either his oeuvre or his rationale.

The same shape of the original arrangement of the working method also leads toward a theoretic approach to it by means of a certain process. To the point where his work has the peculiarity of organizing, simultaneously with its amorphous, gestural and impulsive character, opaque structures, which invoke their preceding perspective development as these have already been formulated in force, anticipating their own self in retrospect during the active phase of the original painting installation. A corridor is then moved down, a penetrating, methodological line by means of which the perception of the work could be formed.

Yiannis Fokas belongs to that generation of artists of modern European history after 1980 which undertook, in regard to the authority of post-war teaching and their own quid pro quo to their historical insecurity, their own refinement of their critical anxiety: they sought to clarify their systems of reference. These are works which considered these systems as an object of inquiry, whether they are inherent in the hermetic image and are a part of its structure, or are presented as the declaration of a future inclination outward. Thus, during the past decade the conditions of a complex of new, artistic categories were fashioned which acted as the intermediary and inconstant states between clashes of already juxtaposed, given, historical, borderline oppositions: these are the oppositions between the perception of the artistic work as a receiver which incorporates any view, to the point the work is alienated during the extreme vindication of monochromy or the point or the line or during the familiarization process with any kind of environment and for the other perception according to which the special, inner, rule-formulating interweaving of a work as its individual composition, constitutes the only possible and fervent pre-condition for approaching it.

But both of these positions from the Sixties had conceived of the work as a compositional unit, as either the complete incorporation or the absolute restraint of an intervention. Through this borderline, dry juxtaposition of two qualities, the new painting was formulated on a European level, most of the time as irresolute in the sense of the persistent safeguarding of the quality of being a receiver which itself would, however, be fashioned at the same time by the look as this painting teaches it.

This is one of the multiple, successive, historical, liberating compromises of modern painting history to the present with its formulation, during the Eighties, of a different type of narrative by means of the incorporation of time duration in the work which would not belong to its constructional process as an irrevocable, rule-formulation quality (of the work), but would consist in the successive and anticipated, by the work itself, refutation of it, the disorganization and reorganization carried out by the eye. Perceptions of the works emerged which were self-rejecting and reciprocally lacerating during their successive, reciprocal substitution, in the interior of the same (individual) artistic inquiry in a way that the inner time of the process of each construction would not necessarily also constitute the presumed experience of the subsequent one. Thus, toward the end of this century the dissolution of the concept called style was fashioned. This discovery of the artists of the Eighties which benefited, we should add, from important experiences in the poetics of the incorporation of space by the Italian artists of the Seventies, resulted in the extreme minimalist ideas of the neutral reception being used gesturally in a way that the duration and the structure of this duration, this chromatic and layered refinement of the receiving image, is developed or conversely the given ad hoc, historical structures are incorporated by the young artists in a usage of their possible capability of reception.

Fokas' proposal, in this process of the flux and retractions of the new painting where the possibilities of inverse relations between the effective image-object and the image of the neutral reception of the anticipated look-object were not always adequately formulated, has had a prophetic meaning: to define what would perhaps come after the retrogression, that is, a reduction to the selfsame arbitrariness of structure which is to be continually reconstructed because of its compositional facility in being successively and persistently, unlimitedly modified, the flow of which, just as the original presumption, survives during the period of the modifications, revealing during the experience of the gesture, the further and non-anticipated exploitation it contains in situ. Thus, the structure is fashioned into a creator of conditions of theory or into the freedom of theory to render possible its unanticipated, practical and perspective repercussions. These are shown by means of the complexity, that is, by means of the main point of reference and support of the history of European painting.

The opposition to the reduction to a minimum of Anglo-Saxon teaching, the pursuit of the exaltation of complex development constitutes the stigma of European painting after 1945, by means of the acceptance of the artistic act as a process of multiplication of the structures. Fokas' proposal includes hints of a procedural development from point to point where the more determinative of each meaning it will incorporate in situ, the more it tends to constitute compositions of the possibilities of organization which function expansively within space and temporally by means of multiple layering at the same point. The reduction to juxtaposed, expanding relations and to additive or detaching relations is then the general shape of behavior indifferent to any of its visual results. Our ability to mentally perceive this vital, gestural treatment of its boundaries in his work, is contained in precisely this transparent expression of its ability to be emotionally reduced to the greatest possible neutrality of the artistic object. This is a treatment which is interwoven perspectively with the only essential part of the resistance time.

In its general shape the construction of the work tends to reveal in a practically systematic way, the greatest possible abstraction in terms of the elements from which the work commenced and this refinement is relative, both in regard to the complexity of the process and the rigorous determination of the artist to remain in the interior of a certain body of thought: this is defined by the juxtaposition, the analysis of the juxtapositions and their re-structuring into synthetic units and the juxtaposition, finally, of these units.

This is the reason these works appear to be rendering narrative images of specialized areas of inquiry which retain, among themselves, subterranean forms of communication which are recognizable, however, because of the transparency of their chromatic, material layers.

This transparency is a primary morphoplastic means of expression for the artist and is directly connected to his way of working: every element of the work is constructed from its interior and because of the qualities of the color and the materials the reading is facilitated.
The large, original gestures, free but precise, are then specialized by means of the complexity of the analysis into interior processes. Thus they acquire an inner depth which is constantly reinforced to the point of their borderline intensity. Another facet of this work is the use, in a painterly way, of certain materials, both as structural elements and, at the same time, as elements of a non-fictive organization of space. Their readability (paper, cardboard, pieces of fabric, or even sections from the artist's previous paintings) emerge from the transparency of their characteristics and produce the impression that the image is constructed from its interior: this becomes obvious when the artist detaches the materials in a way that allows us to confirm the revelation of space on the painting surface.

In a series of works which Fokas has been refining over the past few years, he has entered into a re-arrangement of his work method, by means of a combinative rationale which tends to compensate for and to balance the exalted intensities, the complexities of the refinements of the line and the colour. Originally the work took place in the confines of a limit, in the localization of the events in the interior of a dimension. This was the first probing of the qualities that a chromatic line would be able to acquire during the analysis of its expansive quests and the layering of the construction. Subsequently, Fokas entered into a layering of the enlarged object. This was a re-setting, more theoretical, of the same problem by means of a new refinement of the previous process after its saturation. The saturation, as a limit, is the terminal point of a layering during which the complexity operates in a highly precise way, to the point it becomes unrepeatable, the end point where all the possible gradations of this impulse and the analysis are led to the point of their non-fictive re-composition. The artist is led to the point where the re-modification of the arrangement is not feasible because it is no longer in a position to serve as a reminder of the complexities of its history. The saturation is not chromatic and Anglo-Saxon but procedural, the commonplace of European artistic analysis. This perception could be found in the work of Fokas till around 1987-1988; as it determines the physical terminus of a chromatic and gestural experience it is upgraded by means of an expansion, where it is no longer a hurried re-engagement of the given properties of a layering within the same layering itself, but where the process leading to the new saturation is carried on juxtapositionally on the side and from side to side. The juxtaposition thus re-declares the Great Principle of carrying on the process.

The artist's discovery was that he is carrying on the processes of saturation juxtapositionally and that this modifies the image as it is defined from the point of the saturation of the preceding process toward the vindication of the next saturation which will be layered into new conditions: these conditions are the juxtaposed surfaces as the original and as the new, neutral, dimensional space. Thus, the triptychs and the tetraptychs arise, where the equivalence of the parts can be seen in the procession from saturation to saturation. The narrations flow from there as from a magic box. Narrations concerning the necessity of the juxtaposed organization (types of Biblical images) the composition of the visual theme of which, non-subjective in the arbitrariness of the glance, also constitute the formulation of the greatest possible arbitrariness of the artist which is achieved because of the strict and moral way in which the artist incorporates the reduction to saturation as the only quality, par excellence, of a further undertaking of his under the new conditions, which will both solve it and re-constitute it.

Thus, the works of Yiannis Fokas function on multiple levels. There is, first of all, the organization of the image and the repercussion of this organization of the mental field of the morphoplastic function as juxtaposition. The narration opens out conceptually toward space beyond the boundaries of the confines of the work, in opposition to the closed, synthetic construction. It also retains the orientation of the function of the image by means of layers of transparency which are revealed either through stripping and detachment or through reciprocal attacks and the amassing of colors which are used as materials. Here the material halts the equilibrium of the fictive chromatic spaces by means of the intensification of the real spaces. The critical system, by means of which this work is fashioned, has an original point of reference, the re-processing of the elements of the painting in themselves. Subsequently, it redefines and explores their relations. Finally, it draws from these relations the possibilities of their slackening and their neutralization, by means of the marginal formation of their saturation. The subsequent resumption of the functioning of the saturation up to the point of the beginning of the juxtaposed correlations of the saturations among themselves in ever expanding arrangements, is the point of section, procedural, arbitrary and receiving, but also active, a re-formation of the ideas of new painting.

On the one hand, the rigorous organization of the multiple dimensions of the painting surface towards a sharpening of the impulse and the method, and on the other the revelation of the non-figurative space fostered conceptually, materially and chromatically, are the principles which determine the quality of this work and the intensity with which the artist re-adapts his historical experiences in art. It is a critical position which was formulated in the artist's work because of his original prescience in to transforming the rejection of historical prototypes into rigorous personal re-arrangements and into creative, contrasting rationales.