Part II

Christos Caras was born in Trikala, Thessaly and began his studies in Political Science at the Panteion School, where he stayed for two years, 1948-1950. In 1951 he left the Pantheion and enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts from where he received his diploma in 1955. Two years later he left for Paris where, through a State scholarship, he continued his studies from 1957-1960, after which he stayed on in the French capital until 1963. During the period he made trips to Belgium, Holland, Spain, Italy and England. In 1963 he returned to Greece in order to work though at the same time he made many trips to various large, artistic centers to observe a wide range of artistic expression. With a grant from the Ford Foundation he was able to spend two years in New York and to come into contact with other important artistic centers in the United States. Upon his return to Greece he took a more active role in a number of forums through his, texts, interviews and presentations and fought diligently for the creation and the cultivation of a more productive artistic climate. Caras held his first one-man show in 1961 and this would be followed by many others both in Greece and abroad, the latest in 1990 in the United States; he also took part in even more group shows and represented Greece at the Venice Biennial in 1984.

A painter, who has done some work in sculpture, Christos Caras was distinguished at a very early stage for the multiplicity of his quests and his insistent desire to arrive at purely personal formulations which would express his experiences and his encounters. These encounters are always closely connected to modern reality and both the individual and the collective problems of our time. Even his early realistic endeavors reveal his tendency, as has been noted, to distance himself from the accomplishments of his teachers², while his six years of residence in Paris enabled him to come into contact with modern accomplishment. In the relatively few works that have survived from his Paris period (most of them have been lost³) one can confirm his efforts to turn to account his new knowledge, a pre-condition for further advances. Thus, in some of his works he retained contact with visual reality, but at the same time moved boldly in new directions. Under the influence of Cubism he produced works which used collage with posters in which one sometimes finds a strict organization and other times motifs left to roam unhindered. He appears to have been wavering between the stricter Constructivist organization and the expressionist temperament, elements that are obvious in his work from 1959.

In 1960 Christos Caras moved on to the field of abstract expressionism with its fiery colors, all kinds of conflicting forms and a dynamic and expansive space. And while during the period 1960-1962 his morphoplastic vocabulary worked within the climate of abstract expressionism, in 1963 he moved on to the use of figurative types, particularly the human form, which can be considered as a new and purely personal expressionism. There can be no doubt that through the distortion, the schematization and the fragmentation of his forms and the character of the color the viewer is being presented with the calamitous experiences of the German occupation and the Greek civil war, the personal encounters of Caras with the tragic atmosphere of our times and the history of our country, but also the character of our world. Because through the schematic, bloody bodies, without arms and legs, the heads devoid of personal characteristics, death masks, all depicted in an indeterminate, lifeless space imbued with a supernatural and spectral light, he was expressing with a critical eye all the suffering of mankind during a period when the individual was losing his identity. Some of the characteristics of his works, within this problematic space with the spectral light and the anti-realistic atmosphere, were in essence preparing the subsequent stage in his artistic creation, which was complete by 1970. This was a movement in the direction of magical realism, surrealism really, in which even though his contact with the work of Magritte is obvious, his purely personal accomplishments are the dominant feature.