Lot 10: Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) Houses by the beach 23 x 57 cm.

Houses by the beach
signed 'M. ECONOMOU' (lower right)
oil on flannel
23 x 57 cm.

PROVENANCE:
D. Pieridis collection.
Private collection, Athens.

LITERATURE:
Afroditi Kouria, M. Economou, Adam Editions, Athens, 2001, p. 170-171, no 123 (illustrated).

Suspended between real time and memory, a seaside landscape with three adobe dwellings delightfully rendered in abbreviated curvilinear forms becomes an image of subjective truth and poetic beauty -a screen on which the artist has projected the mystical wonderland of his inner world. Everything is designed by means of the curvilinear, while the presumed solidity of the man-made structures, instead of being consolidated and finalised through a series of verticals and horizontals, is actually undermined by the buildings' elliptical shapes.υ1 As a result, a simple, ordinary subject is transformed into a highly evocative image, generating an atmosphere more like a distant, vague recollection than an actual sense experience.

Houses by the beach probably dates after 1926, the year the artist returned to Greece from France, and was most probably completed in 1927, when he had his second one-man show in Athens and first showed his oils on flannel. Most of the works included in this exhibition were Greek landscapes revealing a magnificent vagueness and poetic uncertainty of space. With his oils on flannel - his 'fuzzy' canvases as he himself called them - which allowed him to better capture the iridescent greys, light blues and precious bright blacks, "Economou proceeded to a more subjective interpretation of the natural environment. His vision changed. The landscapes, houses and trees, rendered in an elliptical, abbreviated manner without descriptive details, with flat surfaces on which his brushwork was invisible and his colour scheme non-naturalistic, assumed the semblance of visions. To realize his inspirational zeal, the artist used white or coloured flannel that softened the tones and whose nap endowed the surface with a peculiar, velvet-like texture, while lessening the definition of outlines. The houses, rendered in curvilinear forms, lost their volume. His works betrayed his appreciation of the expressive capacity of abstraction and simplification, a key principle of modern art."υ2


υ1. See A. Kotidis, Modernism and Tradition [in Greek], University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 1993, p. 201.
υ2. A. Kouria, Michalis Economou, Zygos magazine, no. 56, Nov.-Dec. 1982, pp. 14, 15, 50. See also Kouria, Greek Painters and the Nabis Movement in Metamorphoses of the Modern, The Greek Experience, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery - A. Soutzos Museum, Athens 1992, pp. 379-385; Z. Papantoniou, Eleftheron Vima daily, 29.11.1927.