Page 40 - Studio International - July 1965

Maltezos

by Georges Boudaille

Experimentation with materials plays an important part
in contemporary painting. The appearance of a vinyl
base medium has opened up a new field in this respect
and allowed the painted work a new dimension.
Maltezos makes a particular and personal use of this
tendency.
Maltezos belongs to the generation of artists whose
careers have included an initial period of several long
years before recognition, in both Greece and Europe.
Though his gaining of a reputation may seem rather late,
this five years' 'handicap' on the threshold of life-a
heavy burden to bear-can assuredly be interpreted as
a possibly necessary period of liberation and discovery
of the path proper to his peculiar talent.
A year after his arrival in France, in 1960, Maltezos
had found his own style-that original approach that
engages and holds our attention. The psychological
shock caused by a sudden translation from one land to
another showed Maltezos the path he must take: the
rapidity of his development has been aided by his long
artistic working careeer.
Maltezos exhibited in 1 939, and after 1945 he
increased his share in all the various manifestations of
the fine arts in Greece. In 1957, he achieved a fluid form
of abstract landscape art by using a semi-drip tech-

nique; but his clear palette with lively contrasts has
proved an apt retlection of the light that is found only in
Greece, and which first inspired him.
His first winter in Paris was the occasion of deep­
reaching changes in style: his compositions are
obscured by dark threatening areas, whilst the drawn
element is reduced with extreme austerity. Large
symbolic forms and black phantastic shapes arise with
The paintings by Maltezos repro­ tragic dignity in a set where the lighting is that proper
duced in the article were created to a nightmare. The oppressing atmosphere of these
between 1958/59 and 1964
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