Lot 40: Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) Fishing boat at sunset 54.2 x 65.5 cm.

Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933)
Fishing boat at sunset signed 'M.Economou' (lower left)oil on board54.2 x 65.5 cm.

Provenance: The Antonopoulos collection, Patras and Athens. Thence by descent to the present owner's private collection, Canada and United States.We are grateful to Mrs Afroditi Kouria for her assistance in authenticating this lot.Handled with loosely painted, abbreviated curvilinear forms and stripped of superfluous descriptive detail, Economou's peacefully floating boat1 is transformed into a highly evocative image that feels more like a distant recollection than an actual sensory experience. Fishing boat at sunset prioritizes atmosphere and lyrical feeling above realistic depiction. Introduced by the water reflections that lead the eye from the foreground to the middleground, the poetic mood permeates the entire seascape, turning it into an expressive field that records the artist's emotional and intellectual response to the natural environment. The juxtaposition of soft and heavily worked forms bathed in diffused light creates an ambivalent sense of presence/absence in a poetic 'timescape' where human presence is suggested rather than actually depicted.2 Note how the fisherman is so integrated in the poetic atmosphere that he dissolves into his natural surroundings, partaking in the ethereal vagueness and lyrical uncertainty of space.Moreover, the depiction of the sun, a motif often found in folk Greek art but rarely encountered in Modern Greek and European painting, endows the atmosphere with transient gleams of light and golden luminosities, accentuating the romantic feeling. In 1927, D. Kokkinos noted that the works by Economou were true works of poetry, but so masterfully rendered that their significance as paintings prevailed.1 For a discussion of the boat motif in Economou's work, see A. Kouria, Michalis Economou, Fifty Years from his Death [in Greek], Zygos magazine, no. 56, November-December 1982, p. 15.2 Kouria, Michalis Economou [in Greek], Adam editions, Athens 2001, pp. 106-116.