Oil on canvas 

Sign top left

Dimensions: 35 x 27.5cm

With frame: 35.5 x 27.5 cm

For Flowers , Thanos Tsingos paints with fingers and with a tube. Added to their gray background, the red, white and green come out of the tube to be applied directly to the canvas without going through the painter's palette.

If the spectators approach, the thumbprints spread the paint to form the petals. Is he a painter or a sculptor? The colors give texture and relief, flow to the edge of the frame. It may be a retouching, made after the artist has placed the frame. 

We know that the artist had a love of matter and flowers. During the opening of an exhibition of his studio, it is reported that the ladies left with flowers drawn on their dresses. We also know that the painter had a specialty to which he sometimes returned: to paint a canvas, coat another, then join them to print the first on the second, then separate them and make a few touch-ups at his ease. 

In most of his paintings, Tsingos brings together the irreconcilable: Jackson Pollock's dripping – a technique which consists in projecting paint on the surface of the canvas to obtain superimpositions of color, highly symbolic of the emancipation of painting abstract on figurative art – and floral art, a centuries-old sub-genre of the traditional still life, and to which the precise and veristic gesture of the Flemish masters had accustomed our eye.

A graduate of the National Technical University of Greece (between 1931 and 1936), he worked as an architect until the end of the 1930s. During the Second World War, he enlisted with the Allies in the Middle East, was sentenced to death and then released.

In 1946, he went to Brazil on the recommendation of Le Corbusier. He works on studies and drawings of Brasília. The following year, he went to Paris where he settled until 1960. He left architecture aside and devoted himself to painting and scenography, and even founded his own theatre.

Exhibitions: 

He took part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1954, showed his work in Paris (Galerie Kléber, Galerie Iris Clert), in London (Tooth & Son Gallery, Hannover Gallery and Gallery One) and in Cannes (Galerie 65). He exhibited with the Abstracts, but never renounced figurative painting and above all, his flowers. 

Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Athens Technological Institute (1965), the National Gallery (1980) and the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris (1980). In 1963 his last personal exhibition at the Zygos gallery in Athens where he had returned in 1961. 

Bibliography:

• Marc Ottavi, catalog raisonné in preparation.