Nostalgic and calm landscapes

Paintings by Paris-based Greek artist Yiannis Kottis currently on display at the Zoumboulakis gallery

A. KOROXENIDIS

For more than two decades, Paris-based Greek artist Yiannis Kottis has been painting Mediterranean landscapes, pastel-colored images layered with heavy impasto, pictures that resemble fragments from a dream. They are beautiful paintings to look at, soothing and calming yet slightly melancholy. The Edenic pictures that Kottis paints emanate the sense of a lost innocence, an ideal, timeless world that, like our childhood, remains irretrievable.

Kottis has captured a riveting feeling in all its subtlety and depth. That is why, even though his paintings have not changed that much over the intervening years — either in form or content — they retain the freshness and intriguing quality of something seen for the first time.

The artist’s one-man show at the Zoumboulakis gallery is yet another demonstration of the artist’s skill and imagination.

It includes paintings of trees and Mediterranean gardens with a rabbit or a dog amid the flowers and shrubs. There are also vistas of a land in which Kottis has placed abandoned, turret-like houses. A train is seen passing by in the background — perhaps a reminder of the passage of time — and roads divide the painting into square parts.

Unlike the paintings in his last show, Kottis has begun to use color more profusely. The white background of his previous paintings has given way to luminous blues and dewy greens. Like in his former works, there is a sense of perspective, with no intention of rendering space realistically. His paintings have an unusual sense of verticality, so steep at times that one has the sense that whatever is depicted on the canvas might fall off.

The scale is also unusual. In one of the paintings, the flowers are larger than the houses and a dog is almost the same size as one of the train wagons. Size is symbolic, not real. It is the size that things take up in our imagination, the way that they appear in our dreams.

The world that Kottis plays in is an imaginative one. It is filled with wonder and mystery and represents our deep-seated wishes and our memories from the past. It is a refuge from real life yet a reminder of an inescapable reality. The paintings of Kottis will bring a strange smile to the viewer, a smile of nostalgia for a bygone innocence but also one for life’s calm moments.

Yiannis Kottis at the Zoumboulakis gallery (20 Kolonaki Square, 210.360.8278), through May 6.