Portrait of a woman
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.
It is in the same way that the Prekas has approached his Portrait of a Woman. The rugged and apparently untidy elaboration of the garments and the background have as their purpose to bring out the woman's physiognomy, giving more emphasis to the rendering of the face. The reminder that the subject, in the red waistcoat which she is wearing, may be a woman of the region, demonstrates Prekas's belief that Greece is the place and the people who live there, and the combination of them creates the 'measure' of life.
