Fascinated by the dramatic character of Spanish art, Dimitris Perdikidis -a most important Greek artist of the Diaspora- left for Madrid in 1953 and remained there until 1985 when he finally returned to his mother-land.
During his early days in Spain he broke up forms into multiple planes, relating to the art of the Cubists. He gradually moved towards gestural abstraction, working in the early sixties in a style that emphasized spontaneity and the random episodes of the creative act. This tendency, one of the European versions of American abstract expressionism, flourished in Spain at the time. Perdikidis soon became part of the Spanish artistic avant-garde scene: he participated both in 1964 and 1966 at the Venice Biennale representing Spain and further took part in numerous exhibitions on Spanish painting around the world. Nonetheless, his sentimental ties with Greece never broke, exhibiting his works in various galleries, in Athens, Crete and elsewhere.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of political unrest reflected in the arts worldwide. Deeply affected by the global situation and, in particular, by the rise of dictatorship in Greece in 1967, Perdikidis abandoned abstract painting and turned to an art of protest. Inspired by Brecht's theatre of alienation, he depicted the cruel aspects of his epoch using realism so as to provoke the viewer's immediate response. As a chronicler he adopted an emotionally removed glance to criticize violence, exile, imprisonment, hunger, suffering, death. He further guided the viewer to the objective scenes through geometrical elements that added an anti-realistic note to his paintings.
Around 1980, entering his last phase, Perdikidis combined elements from his previous periods into works that intertwined abstract brush-strokes and rich textures with basic geometric shapes. An adherent of Heraclitian thought, he harmonically interweaved the opposites: geometry with lyricism, logic with feeling and order with chaos.
Bia Papadopoulou
Art Historian
