Figures

Konstantinos (Dikos) Byzantios was born in 1924 in Athens. He took his first lessons from his painter father Pericles Byzantios and then studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1938-42) with K. Parthenis and O. Argyros. With a scholarship from the French government (1946) he continued in Paris, at the Academies Julian and Grande Chaumiére. He settled and lived permanently in France, where he was associated with personalities such as A. Giacometti, E. Ionesco, Christian Gervos and Dimitris Galanis. He also worked in printmaking. Taking visual reality as his starting point, the works he painted in the 1950s are distinguished by his emphasis on the atmospheric, his expressionistic use of colour and his emphasis on the role of light. From the early 1960s, he exploited elements of abstraction, which he combined with figurative motifs (human figures, objects of everyday life and still lifes), fragmented and strongly schematized. From the mid-1970s he returned to neo-representational tendencies, with themes of still lifes imposed within an elliptical space. The human figure claimed a prominent position in his painting from the mid-1980s and the mannerist elongation of bodies, problematic space, dynamic diagonals, anti-realist elements, enigmatic atmosphere and pessimism became key features of his painting. He was honoured by the French government with the titles Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1985) and Officier des Arts et des Lettres (1990) and major retrospective exhibitions of his work were held in France in 1997 (Espace des Arts, Chalon-sur-Saône) and in Greece in 2007 (Benaki Museum, Athens). He died in Mallorca in 2007.