Vacation-home 1955

Alekos Kontopoulos’s "Vacation-home" is a headscratcher, that's for sure, with its stacked up rectangles and loosey goosey handling of architectural forms. It feels like the start of something, a process. Look at the way Kontopoulos lays down the paint, thin and drippy in some spots, thick and slabby in others. It's all about the physical properties of the medium itself. I'm especially drawn to the buttery greens and reds in the painting's lower third, the way they seep into the browns and blacks like a water stain, creating these weirdly compelling textural effects. You can see echoes of someone like, oh I don't know, Milton Avery in the way he flattens space and simplifies form, but there's also something deeply personal and idiosyncratic about Kontopoulos's approach. It's not about capturing a specific place or time, but about exploring the possibilities of paint itself.