In the flow of colours

The colours are the keys, the eyes are the harmony
and the soul is the piano with its strings.
The artist is the hand that plays the instrument
and by touching one key or another, he vibrates the soul.

Wassily Kandinsky

If there is something that characterizes Tasos Aridas’ art, it is its special relationship with the notion of time. His artistic career, from 1979, when he began his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts, until today, is directly linked to his constant confrontation with diverse materials and methods, seeking new aesthetic qualities each time. From watercolours to oil painting, from fine brushstrokes to thick colour bands as well as from the wooden surface of portable paintings to fresco painting, the stake is always the same: The revelation of the fluidity of time and, by extension,the life of the forms. In his plain pictorial narratives, whether landscapes, portraits or even still lifes, time is not frozen and the pictorial space gives the impression of constant change. The decisive role in the whole mobility is played by the dynamics of the colours, which convey their inner pulse in the instantaneous transformation of any represented form, making it a living organism. Works such as “Clear sky after the rain”, the various kinds of fish or even “The December Visitor”, allude to an impressionistic or spontaneous or even abstract painting. On the other hand, however, Tasos Aridas’ colours are structural elements of three-dimensional forms and their massive composition, in depictions that are strictly thought out.

In his works “Happy Winter”, “The Attack of the Summer” and “September”, the harshness of still life meets Cezanne’s “Apples” and the French painter’s desire to explore the possibilities offered by colour to depict stereometric forms. It could be said that these still lifes are not only still life. Not because they seem to have been cut off from their natural environment but because, transcending a naturalistic representation, they take over the space with the vividness of their colours. We see this in “May” with the bright red poppies that scatter their petals like blood spots, like the mauve petals from “The First Hummingbirds”, but also in the seasonal hooves of the compositions “Melancholy of October”, “Happy Winter” and “The Attack of the Summer”. The color intensity of the still lifes, however, is replaced by the earthy tones of the portraits. Here, the skin reflects mental states confirming tactile meaning, as Didier Anzieu formulates it in his book “Skin Ego”, while the gaze and lips reveal thoughts and desires.

The visual narratives of Tasos Aridas, as a whole, cease to be silent images. With the consistency of a human being who tirelessly, first experiences, then loves and finally paints, and with a flowing visual discourse, the artist creates colourful spacetimes that invite the viewer and provoke his senses and feelings.

Evangelia Diamantopoulou
Assistant Professor of Art History
Department of Communication and Media, University of Athens, Greece