Christos M. Joachimides - art historian, curator

 

"An explosive cheerfulness streams from the images of Alexis Akrithakis.
It is contagious, it invites you to participate - to play on a tumbling meadow, to enter the colorful Lunapark, whose bright lights illuminate every passion.


A microcosm in flowing motion, in perpetual action, a daily baroque feast unwinds itself in front of us, by translating the visually tangible into the small and the elementary, makes the picture of an immediate world experience, lucid as in a dream.

The virtual world of Akrithakis does not mean escaping the complexity of this experience; it seeks only to humanize its structure by analizing it in its particles. Flower and man, wheel and flag, heart and sun constitute the scenery of a reality that has denatured on the level of the game. One could say that the pictures of Akrithakis are the artistic equivalent to the visionary concepts of hapiness of Herbert Marcuse

This is the very personal mythology of a dreamer who, awakened by his own fireworks, keeps on marveling at the world and poetically reflects this astonishment in an almost automatic act of painting.

A poetry as intuitive knowledge?"

Text from the catalogue of Alexis Akrithakis exhibition at the Goethe Institut, Athens, 1968