The Bridegroom, 1967

A student of Yannis Moralis, Alekos Fassianos is one of the descendants of the Thirties Generation and shares its ideology regarding the creation of a Greek modernism. His mature work is inspired by an idealized daily life starring ordinary people: young urbanites, bicyclists, cigarette smokers, couples etc. Fassianos’ popular, immediately recognizable style is a blend of ancient Greek pottery painting, folk-art traditions, Matisse and Art-brut. He uses a fine, flexible line to describe figures and objects in a drawing that is intentionally simple and stylized. Sometimes the form remains white while the background is covered by a uniform flat color, similar to ancient Greek black-figure pottery. In Bridegroom, an early work, aside from the unusual green palette, all the elements of his enterprise are already present: the intentionally simplified drawing, folk iconography, and a narrative style. The striped suit is a reference to his “teacher” Yannis Tsarouchis, who frequently used this motif in his pictures of young working-class men in the late 1930s. The white stripes in both cases are created by scraping off the paint. The poetic element is emphasized by the groom’s windblown hair.