Part I

The artistic creation of Christos Caras. The various directions embodied in his quest and his new accomplishments.

Christos Caras, a painter well-known both in Greece and abroad is carrying on his endeavors, expanding his conquests and enriching his expressive language with continually new characteristics. The artist began his studies in Political Science and Economics, but sacrificed them for the sake of art. Caras has never wanted to confine himself to any specific course and thus become a traitor to his very self. Therefore, he could be characterized as a creator who after experimenting with various stylistic modes managed to achieve an expressive language which is distinguished for its wealth, its inwardness and the quality of its formulations. This can be readily affirmed and with utmost clarity in his latest efforts which are being presented today.

This highly endowed artist in close contact with traditional viewpoints but with a permanent anxiety about the need to express the characteristics and the problematic nature of our world, quickly moved on to the movements, which would assist him in arriving at his purely personal expressive idiom. Quite early on, it was apparent that his problem was not the rendering of visual reality, but the conveying of his encounters with the world and his emotions concerning life, into expressive values capable of supplying a new and personal interpretation of the nature of our times. During no period in his creative career has Caras been interested in startling the viewer, but rather has wanted to convince him through the sureness of his composition, the character of his forms and the rendering of space, that is, through the values of pure painting. Moreover, as it has been correctly emphasized: "Right from the very start Caras was looking for a way to release the forces within him"¹, that is, to develop his own personal sensibility and the move ahead to his own personal solutions. From his previous endeavors, done in the climate of realism and the figurative movements, he passed on to a command of Abstract Expressionism and subsequently Neo-Representationalism which in turn would lead him to a new and clearly personal, more surrealistic, expressive language with symbolic extensions. Always faithful to himself, continually probing but never leaping ahead, he has proceeded from the exterior to the interior, from the anecdotal and supplementary elements to the applications of purely plastic values and an ever growing monumentalization of his forms, which is underlined by a much broader imaginary space.