Alekos Fassianos, presented as the Greek Picasso or the Matisse of modern times, for his works which “breathe Greece”, flew away like the emblematic birds which adorn many of his paintings. He was to be buried on Tuesday in the Athens district of Papagou where he lived. Died Sunday in Athens at the age of 86, the painter-sculptor shared his life between Greece and France where he had rubbed shoulders with writers and painters like Louis Aragon, who commented on his works, or Matisse and Picasso whom he admired. “Paris played a role not because I met incredible people there but because I saw Greece with a free eye”, he confided in 2021 in an interview with the Greek newspaper Protothema. “So I didn’t just feel like a Hellenist but also understood the Greek soul,” he observed. Alekos Fassianos was born on October 25, the same birthday as Picasso, like to specify his wife and daughter met by AFP in the fall. He studied the violin but also painting at the School of Fine Arts in Athens from 1956 to 1960 with Yannis Moralis, one of the most famous Greek painters of the 20th century. Often compared to Matisse or Picasso for his colorful works between realism and abstraction, Fassianos nevertheless defended himself from having been inspired by one artist rather than another and preferred to claim to be “77” influencers, told AFP his wife Mariza Fassianou. Refusing all constraints, Fassianos traced, without shadow or perspective, his characters drawn from Greek mythology and folklore, Byzantine or naive art. “Fassianos inhabits a mythical country which is badly located on the map but is doomed to the dazzling brightness of the sun, to the perfumes of the flowers, to the rustling of the wind swirling around the birds whose plumage is the color of the rainbow”, wrote regarding it the art critic and writer Pierre Cabanne. In 1960, he flew to Paris where he took courses in lithography at the National School of Fine Arts. The same year, he made his first exhibition in Athens, and very quickly his works traveled around the world, from Paris to Munich, from Tokyo to Sao Paolo. They can be seen in particular at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, at the Maeght Foundation or at the National Gallery of Athens. “I like red and blue volumes but not abstraction. Colors should always have a meaning”, he said in 1964. A multi-talented artist, Fassianos created frescoes in the Athens metro, theater sets, book illustrations, sculptures, ceramics, mosaics and curtain rods that still adorn his home in Papagou, a quiet district of the Greek capital. A true “museum where we live”, according to his daughter Viktoria Fassianou, his house is full of objects he has created such as his emblematic bronze birds or stained glass windows decorated with a wrought iron sun, AFP noted. He made his own ties and had made his wife’s dress and crown for her wedding on the Cycladic island of Kea, where he liked to recharge his batteries while encountering Greek traditions and authenticity. “For those who knew and loved him, he will remain the warm, luminous friend who liked to invite us to taste sea urchins on a wild beach,” Franco-Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras wrote to AFP. He saluted the memory of the “great painter, exemplary painter and philosophical painter” whose humor he loved “caustic once morest stupidity and vulgarity”. Son of a composer and grandson of an Orthodox pop, this father of two had received numerous distinctions, in particular that of honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts of Russia. France, his second homeland, awarded him in 2020 the distinction of Officer of the Legion of Honor and Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. But “all the work of Fassianos, the colors that fill his canvases, the multidimensional forms that dominate his paintings, breathe Greece”, explained the Greek Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis paid tribute to the painter and poet who “leaves us a precious legacy”. A museum in his name will open in the fall in the center of Athens.
.
