From the catalogue of the exhibition at the Gallery “Antinor” in 1985

A means of approaching a pictorial testimony…………………………………………………………………………………

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Yiorgos Hatzakis’ themes include figures and landscapes, which bear embossed testimonies of an adventure, a decay, a complete alteration, an arduous torment.

Especially his figures are identical to saintly figures of martyrs, from the manner of negotiating their plastic form. Pain has not only been conveyed on them by its expressionistic characteristics, but it has also been composed by allusional relations to certain traditional Byzantine models. The figures, synthetically and eccentrically highlighted, create means of surfacing from their background of both the Cretan post-Byzantine icon-painting and the icon-painting of Caracci and Caravaggio. The chromatic shading of the background (siennas, ombras, ochres) with the smooth manner of the brushwork and the palette-knife, charge these models with experience, models which expressively tend to become monuments of their tortures by setting boundaries to their vital space.
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In Yiorgos Hatzakis’ landscapes one meets similar negotiations concerning his space. Through a universally dark surface, which makes the spectator suspicious of the stirring-ups and the fermentations of the form and colour, the space is expanded with bursting brightness, so as to express spectrally a function “in the offing”. It is about the function of deconstructing and reconstructing the chromatic mass, which forms the conditions of creative revelation and promotional function of the behaviour of the form. A form which is suspected to be born dissolving and transmutated, with open links to the new charges of associations in relation to form and manner.

Athena Schina