"Doves", 1968. Illustration for a book by E. Averoff
The rich opus of Paris Prekas includes sculpture, painting, print-making, and architecture. It represents a constant quest which fruitfully combined the present with the past, a fervency which prompted him to discover Greece, as he journeyed in its history or set down an impression of its every corner, every place of memory, every expression of its soul, which he depicted in a composite, highly personal artistic idiom. Using particularly water-colour in the rendering of landscape, which dematerialises and spiritualises the content by its translucency, he created pictures which were not confined to a mere topographical depiction, but served as an experiential contact of the artist with space. By constructivist-abstract aesthetic approaches and references to the simplicity and austerity of ancient Greek art, he combined in his painting history, myths, and traditions to produce compositions of a monumental character, sometimes with symbolic extrapolations.
The water-colours Earth Womb, Doves, When the Gods Gave their Blessing and Fire and the Axe are art work for the covers of four books by Evangelos Averoff. Their purpose is to give a foretaste of the content of the book in question and for this reason they are sometimes dreamlike and sometimes harsh.
