The task of writing a text dealing with the creative work of an important and multi-dimensional artist is an intrinsically and multifariously challenging subject, especially when it is done at precisely that moment in which his work becomes a living expression of his maturity. Until now, the compositions of the eminent and distinguished modern Greek painter, Christos Caras, (works inexhaustible in their inspiration, approach and mode of discovery), have been studied and analyzed in detail and depth by well-known Greek and foreign art historians and art critics, only in terms of specific stages and periods.

The fortunate coincidence of the way Caras expresses the maturity of his quest through his present creations-works which reveal themselves through many perspectives, prisms and visual angles, are connecting links with a particularly fertile and multi- faceted past, while at the some time they constitute the distillation and the accumulation of a wealth of nuances of impression, endeavor and emotion - is what has dictated the present study. Its principal aim is:
The detection and diagnosis of the course of this artist s work with emphasis on the fundamental constituents of his artistic temperament - from the beginning of his career until today - in order to bring to the fore, through examples and illustrations, the unbreakable (in his particular case) connection of this painters work to his personality.

Only now, through his achieved full maturity - a maturity which cost him a heavy price in endeavor, sacrifice and questing - is the essential cohesion and solid structure of Caras's work revealed. This enduring structure, by ignoring vapid distractions and superficial mannerisms, mirrors, as directly and faithfully as possible, is the core of the inspiration and expression of the painter.

This is verified through the five-fold conformation of the main stages of his work, as they are set faith and characterized by the painter himself : abstractionism, post-representationalism, expressionism, lyrical-surreal creations, which we would classify as being posf-realist spatial poetry and special constructions. These stages include the sculptures, objects of applied art and all sorts of other constructions that the artist has executed from time to time.

As the course of his work developed and the above stages evolved, a certain relationship appeared positive-negative, analysis-synthesis, thesis-antithesis, statement-contradiction - which functions according to the hidden procedures of an undeclared and unique birth process, a process which stands out as the supreme and indisputable proof - within the framework of the present internationalization of art - of a personality rare in its authenticity and consequence.

This is a personality which inductively and steadily, without overwhelming emphasis, sensational outburst, shallow resolution or typical mannerisms, has managed to remain unassailable in the face of an internationally traducing fashion, and impregnable and impervious to any kind of parasitic-disjunctive element and its corresponding provocation. We have already noted that the manifold creative orbit of Christos Caras can be seen in retrospect to be the most indisputable proof of the authenticity and authority of his endeavor in large and multifariously arduous endeavor.

The discernible key feature, fabric and thread of a unique and separate reading of modern art, is offered us by Christos Caras, already from the early stages of his work. At the Panhellenic Exhibition in 1952, we have seen samples of his work from the time he had enrolled in the studio of Georgiadis, or when he was under the guidance of Moralis, or advised by G. Pappas; when indeed, despite this figurative and classical style, he composed works with a certain element subject to a different interpretation and analysis.

We, first and foremost, refer to the collages he began to assemble in Paris in 1959, two years after he first settled there, on a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. This was a period when most of his colleagues were still going to Italy. He made these collages because he was financially strapped - out of posters given a patina by rain and time which he had retrieved from the streets of Paris. They were abstract in expression and, despite their strict structure, were characterized by a unique measuredness and a manifest style. Here, the orchestrated harmony - the fruit of an instinctual aesthetic on the part of the painter, and the result of his ability to firmly "set up" his work and insure the stability of its structure - would result in a charisma that would accompany him and distinguish him throughout his career. The instinctual motion, which is experienced like a dynamic gesture, characterizes the personal contribution of this painter to non-objective art - the current which took post-war Paris by storm and nurtured the abstract expressionism of New York - and expresses an authentic as well as exuberant personality endowed with an extremely powerful instinct in terms of his sense of equilibrium. Works from this period (1957-1964) presented in Athens, first at Zygos Gallery (1962) and then at the Hilton Gallery (1963), brought Greece a genuine taste of the artist's personal interpretation of non- objective art, Here, the radiantly ordered shapes set apart by a striking density of raw material, are expressed at the beginning almost exclusively in black and white, which alternately overlap in accordance with a conceptualized inverse proportion, but always maintain a dynamic figurative stamp. This would also be noted by Jean-Jacques Laveque in his article about the group exhibition of several proponents of non-objective art at their Solon de Comparaisons in Paris (1960). In his article he makes special reference to Christos Caras for his dynamic contrasts of white and black as well as his full-bodied chromatic material.