Lot 119: Valerios Caloutsis (Greek b.1927)

Concrete on silver No.2
signed and dated 'V.Caloutsis 60' (upper left), also signed, inscribed with title and dated 'London 1960' on the reverse
oil and concrete on canvas
96.5 x 129 cm. (38 x 50 3/4 in.)

Valerios Caloutsis was born on the island of Crete in 1927. Following a period of study at the school of art in Athens, he came to England in 1952 and was for a while a student at St.Martin's. In 1953 he moved to Paris where he studied Fresco painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and it is in the French capital where the artist now resides. Caloutsis exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in the early 1960s and it was prior to one of these exhibitions that Mervyn Levy was able to interview the artist. In a subsequent article reproduced in the "Studio" entitled "Ego into Art" Levy writes:'...(Caloutsis) is ..an abstract painter, but one who has long ago sounded, and rejected as merely fatuous, the trivial possibilities of those forms and styles of abstract expressionism which do not quickly move into the province of discipline and order..he has jettisoned the formal trappings of the studio. He uses neither an easel, nor a palette, preferring to work from fragments of broken glass on which he spreads his colours; often gold, silver, or bronze paint..he prepares a stiff mix of plaster bound with glue, lays his painting surface on the floor and, with a series of trowels, painting knives and pieces of wood, creates on the canvas a pattern of thick, raised surfaces, beautifully textured and marked. Texture is of primary importance. "I am interested", he said, "first of all in texture. I want to create surfaces that the spectator feels compelled to touch."...His love of texture is the love of earth; of the multi-lingual, multi-millioned tongues with which the textural qualities of nature itself speak, and impose upon our senses, a pattern of incredible richness and wonder...'
Caloutsis is represented in the permanent collections of art galleries in Melbourne, Australia and Toledo, USA. His work can also be seen in the Common Rooms of Worcester College, Oxford.