Images 1974

Alekos Kontopoulos created this untitled oil on canvas. The surface of this painting feels almost like a clouded mirror, where gestures come together and hover. There's an intuitive sense of layering, like the process of applying paint, wiping it away, and then adding more. I keep coming back to that small red dot, it’s so small but it really holds the piece together. It’s like a single, confident punctuation mark in the midst of all these ambiguous shapes. Its placement is very deliberate, adding a sense of balance to all the smoky and undefined forms around it. When I look at this painting, I find myself thinking of Milton Avery, especially in the way he reduced form to simple blocks of color, with the same interest in subtly shifting planes. But Kontopoulos brings his own sensibility. It is a testament to the way artists build upon and converse with the work of others.