Yiannis Fokas' painting is a lonely course through the polyphonic proposition expressed by his generation. It recounts the passion of matter and colour, of form and kinaesthetic writing. It is the ballad of the necessity of expression that transmutes a living experience into a picture with fluid colours and solid forms. Ever since the beginnings of the 80s, the artist has consistently rather deposited than described the whole spectrum of his relations with his immediate environment, his era and his own self.

He is one of the major introducers of this kind of plastic expression in greek painting and perhaps the only one who consistently keeps on phrasing his artistic proposition without sterile obsessions and commitments. His work is organized into morphological and aesthetic units in which the artist, on different occasions, studies the ontological substance of non-representational form: the intensity and the silence of the sound of the forms, the accidental and the studied nature of matter that gets transformed into form, material and color relations, as well as material and form relations.

The ontology of his artistic image is widened as the composition is continually enriched with new elements, which function as violations of the general aesthetic principle, testing the flexibility of its limits. There are two kinds of such elements: designing elements and material elements; the former has the nature of rationalistic form which either diffuses in the formless and kinaesthetic environment of the picture or dominates and through its structure establishes its power over the "gestural depositions of colours on the painting surface. The materials, on the other hand, play the double role of the supporter of the mass and the volume of colour (plaster, roughcast, paper etc.) and the prompter of the artist's intention to underline his personal relation with his immediate environment, since, on a substantial number of his works, he has laid the "small wastes" of his studio (paper, glue, string, cardboards).

The personal element is intense in Yiannis Fokas' work, in the sense that it stamps the emotional fluctuations and relations of the artist. What is really impressive though is his aptitude for pushing his pictures almost out of the boundaries of the region of the subjective and for conversing with more general and therefore less subjective rules. For example, it is much easier to "read" the relation of a quantity of colour mixed with some volume-adding plaster with an adjacent colour which is sprayed so as to be more transparent: in other words, the sprayed colour functions as the shadow and the bizarre illumination of the chromatic volume it borders on. The eye of the spectator I will trace the relations that have something to say more quickly and more directly than the relations whose meaning is indirect.

It is exactly from this framework that the new unit of his works tends to differentiate. Of course, when commenting on a work characterized by the stability of its artistic orientations, todays or future differentiations are well expected to develop within the framework established by his own plastic language over more than twenty years. Judging by their nature, the meaning and the significance of those differentiations should be considered rather as the result of the emotional reactions and changes of the artist's extra-artistic meditations.

The emergence of the FIGURE in Yiannis Fokas' work is not recent: what is recent is his resolution to radically settle his relation with the procedure of the recovery of figures that gush from the memory of experiences, in which they had been stored as indirect inscriptions of parts of the immediate environment. While in the past the move of presentation towards the painting surface had to be filtered through a specific painting attitude, nowadays, the fragmentary image is thought of as a semantic idol, the designing of desire. It is a desire that has been wandering selectively through moments in the History of Art, which, to a large extent, didn't seek for the object as a thing but rather as the cause for plastic meditation. The cup, the skate and the vase with the brushes, even the colour tubes, have actually functioned in this way. The object unfolds through different substances as truth, experience, absence (trace) and plastic entity. Indeed, one of the most significant works of the exhibition was performed on a dismantled frame, on which the traces of its original destination - a Picasso's poem - were retained as the main visual substratum. The writing and the graphisms, the chromatic environment, the watery table at the lower part of the painting weave a framework, on which the exceptional plastic impression of the vase of brushes is projected as a monument of chromatic risk.
Similarly, in his compositions with the box lids and the colour tubes, the artist, using the artifice of transposing the perception of the objects' entity, constructs a peculiar plastic environment. The colours acquire a material content, whereas the pasted-up objects, dehydrated by the content of time, have lost their materiality.

The artist's turn or rather his decision not to curtail his emerging relation with the images of experience may be stamping Yiannis Fokas' direct reaction to the spurs of everyday life. However, it should also be recognized as an attempt to meet with the new version of the world that has been established without our knowledge or because of our inactivity. He is rather more stimulated by the access, through the codes of art, to the various versions of the existence of things that are interspersed around us; codes which he turns in such a way so as to let new elements slip into and enrich our experience. This is why Yiannis Fokas paintings have started to make their presence evident so explicitly!