Painting

Iason Molfessis was born in Athens in 1925. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1941-1946) under Konstantinos Parthenis, Dimitrios Bishkinis and Epaminondas Thomopoulos, while he also studied at the Law School of the University of Athens (1942-1944). He studied Byzantine art during his military service (1947-49). In 1950 he moved to Paris, where he attended painting and fresco painting courses at the École des Beaux-Arts (1951-52). He lived mainly in Paris, with the exception of his stay in Greece, when he was elected professor at the Department of Visual and Applied Arts of the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1988-1991). The last years of his life until his death in 2009 he lived in Athens. During the period 1950-70 he was mainly engaged in painting. His first works are compositions with human figures and landscapes. After settling in France, his painting moved within the framework of abstract tendencies and amorphous art. The restriction of colour, the intensity and brutality of expressionist, gestural writing, dramatic and a looming lyricism are the main characteristics of his compositions. In the early 1960s he exploited the possibilities of computers, incorporating fragments of dotted films into the painting surface. From 1968 he turned to sculpture and began to create reliefs and large sculptural spaces in Paris and other French cities. In these spaces, mythology symbioses with contemporary technical culture, with a deep metaphysical-philosophical background and a key symbolic dimension. He has presented series of reliefs (Sarcophagus, Helios, Tixi, Hydrogen, etc.), while the titles of his large sculptural compositions-interventions in public spaces are indicative: Agora, Labyrinth, Fossil, Delta, Planet, etc. Since the early 1990s, his works have been relief or flat compositions approaching painting, in which integrated computer systems were combined with schematized human forms.