Fruit and birds, 2004

Vasilis Sperantzas studied painting and engraving in Paris (1956 - 1969) and London. He taught the technique of lithography at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1976 to 1988, when he returned to Greece to settle permanently. In his work, events from everyday life are transformed by an almost childlike innocence into pleasure, enjoyment. Scenes and experiences come to life in a magical place filled with symbols, the dominant feature being the plasticity of the forms and the strong, sensuous, anti-realistic colour. Human figures in a room, erotic, filled with lust, are shown among a host of objects where the imaginary world of symbols, childhood memories, the events of life (birth, love-making, marriage) point back to similar expressions by the giants of painting, whom the artist himself lovingly quotes: Picasso, Miro, Chagall. The large surprised eyes which are typical of these figures, their stylisation, and the simplistic adornment of the female body take the memory back to those coloured lithographs which once flooded Greece. A nostalgia emerges from his work for a world which is now the past.