We all have a square that we feel is also our own. I am at Iraklis Parcharidis’s square where it is snowing coal dust, as I believe my dear friend Nasos Theofilou would say. Coal dust that sketches and draws the people who pass by, but also those that have already passed, the memories and the recollections, as the scene empties and fills again. The theatre of shades, the puppet show, the street theatre, the commedia dell’arte, the carnival people and the stilt walkers are the protagonists of a dramatic feast that takes place in the wide setting of the square.

Blurred, vague but nevertheless classic images from years of depression but also years of hope at the same time. The walk of the passers by, the slow and stable course of the bodiless miserables to the predetermined ideal destination, each painting narrates and describes the theatrical performance of an entire day.

Iraklis Parcharidis’s painting has managed to make me become a video-art fan – God forgive me – and I aspire to videotape for twelve continuous hours each painting of the artist, so that I can pin the viewers down to watch a moving picture that they themselves will invent and feel. […]

Aristidis Yiayiannos

* From the catalogue of Iraklis Parcharidis’s exhibition “Painterly Elegies”, Titanium Yiayiannos Gallery, Athens, 2009.