Landscape, ca. 1970

Vlassis Caniaris is one of the most daring and original representatives of the Greek avant-garde and has an acclaimed career both in Greece and in Europe (Italy, Paris, Berlin). After paying his early dues to painting on canvas, abstraction and collage, he took his art on to conquer three-dimensional space. Caniaris stages actions in a three-dimensional space with human figures as protagonists, thus giving a new dimension and sociopolitical meaning to Pop Art and Arte Povera. In Landscape, anxious hands, which seem to have come from casts, emerge from a sensitive painterly blue surface. They have ruptured the surface of the canvas and gesture either threateningly (clenched fist) or beseechingly, seeking not only a place in the sun but also the right to articulate their own discourse, to protest, in yet another Caniaris work with an latent political message.