Couple

Sarantis Karavousis has a profound knowledge both of the ancient, Byzantine, and vernacular tradition - which he got to know by means of travelling all over Greece on a scholarship from the Sate Scholarship Foundation after his graduation from the School of Fine Arts in 1953 - and of European art - old and modern - which he studied with a French government scholarship from 1967 in Paris, where, in the end, he lived for more than 30 years. The artist has created an oeuvre which has a vibrant life through the point of reference of antiquity, but also through the mythology and symbolism suggested by everyday functional objects, rendered with the magic and poetry of metaphysical painting. Reality and memory, impression and remembrance, mythology and iconography make up a bizarre world, full of serenity and nostalgia, a magical, dreamlike world. Statues with severed limbs, pieces of sculptures, pitchers, antefixes, masks, broken columns, pieces of ancient inscriptions are combined with simple everyday objects, bottles, clothes, textiles, clocks, in order to convey the magic and poetry of a metaphysical painting which expresses itself in dream landscapes, still lifes, or interiors of rooms.