Gazette Drouot - C apencheres

Pavlos like the painter Zeuxis
Here apples, figs, grapes, red fruits and hazelnuts
compose an appetising autumnal
fruit basket. The fruits, balanced precariously
in a pile, seem to pour out of the
crate. They are made of guillotined paper,
a special technique adopted by Pavlos that has virtually
become his trademark. Greek like the painter Zeuxis
(whose works looked so real, as Pliny the Elder tells us,
that birds came to peck at his painted grapes), Pavlos
loves life, the spontaneous source of his art, evoking his
childhood in Filiatra in the Peloponnese. Pavlos Dionyssopoulos
left to study at the Athens school of fine arts.
In 1958, he obtained a grant from the Greek government
to spend three years in Paris, where he soon began to
mingle with the New Realists, and developed a
friendship with Raymond Hains in particular, who had a
passion for posters. It was possibly Hains who suggested
this material to him. Pavlos exhibited guillotined posters
at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1963. As soon as he
reached Paris, he was fascinated by the bubbling art
scene there. Klein was exhibiting "Le Vide" at Iris Cler,
USEFUL INFO
Where ? Paris- Drouot
When ? 26 November
Who ? Piasa auction house
How much ? €15,000/20,000
See the catalogue : www.gazette-drouot.com
>
UPCOMING AUCTIONS THE MAGAZINE
and inventing his blue monochrome; a little later, in 1961,
an exhibition by Jasper Johns took the artistic milieu by
storm, reinforcing Pavlos decision to create non-painted
images that were more real than the originals. A genuine
poetic language that was very much of his time, when
we think of César's compressions and Spoerri's trap
pictures. He used whatever was at hand: first magazines,
then posters from metro stations, replacing the brush
with a Stanley knife and guillotine. He sought to imprint
movement and, above all, colour on his work. His first
pieces were abstract, with fine strips of coloured paper
giving life to the surface. The resulting optical vibration
was intense; all of a sudden, reality took shape. Pavlos
then found himself half-way between the New Realists
and Pop art. Anne Foster
N° 19 I GAZETTE DROUOT INTERNATIONAL
HD
Pavlos Dionyssopoulos, known as Pavlos (b. 1930),
"Corbeille de fruits", 2002. Paper construction in a Plexiglas
box, 60 x 60 x 60 cm.
17