John Valyrakis

John Valyrakis possesses a strong visual instinct, as well as the knowledge that allows him to keep pace with his times, and to express, quite convincingly, his generation. John paints for his pleasure and at the same time is interested in the pleasure of others. Maybe even in the pleasure of the people of tomorrow, since whatever important thing we do one moment, is bound to become history the next moment.

The painter experiments in this phase of his career with the lone bodies and their unspent sensuality, their movement that doesn’t result in communication. Deep down though they are optimistic. Even when they are falling upside down like Baselitz’s fgures, or like in Bruce Nauman’s “somersaults” you get the impression that they are not sinking in a void but they are swimming in a watery space, almost happy. Like angels who may have lost their wings but not their desire to fy.
This ambivalence of his images makes Valyrakis insist on fragmentation, on gross plans where his neo-pop subject matters meet his neo-expressionist temperament: a back bending while dancing; a hand spreading out like desire; a girl, hanging in the sky, dreaming; a couple that decided to look away; all of them illustrations of a script about pairing and separating that is yet to be written. And all this using suggestive forms, between minimal and monumental, warm fery colours, wide amphidextrous brushstrokes like drum improvisations. A Giovanni Boldini that escaped the Belle Époque in order to arrive at the 21st century. Oh, and his ink drawings are so masterfully made that the mastery is invisible, and so classic that they become modern.

PS. John doesn’t smoke, but his fgures are constantly smoking. He is content studying the spontaneity of their movements using Andy Warhol’s bitter yellows or the intense oranges of Giorgos Vakirtzis’ postwar posters. Heart-warming.