Painting

Theofilos (Chatzimichail):

A self-taught folk painter with inspiration and sensitivity that went far beyond the conventionalism of folk art. Born in Mitilini, he spent most of his life there and in the villages of Mt. Pilio, painting the walls of private dwellings and shops and, more rarely, the surfaces of portable objects. He portrayed historical subjects and genre scenes in a unique combination of iconographic symbols.

Theofilos (Chatzimichail)

His talent lays in the assimilation of past conventions into a personal style that evokes a deep faith in his visions, apparent in all his works. With an exceptional feeling for color, the immediacy and simplicity of his figures, recalled the artistic conceptions of Matisse and Fauvism. It is amazing how he conveyed the sense of space and analogies, in a way that made all seem dreamy and poetic. The great poets, Seferis and Elytis, wrote of his power to give expression to the true face of Greece. For Tsarouhis, he "belongs in the company of wise men and lunatics whose blessed megalomania smashed the confines of academicism". A unique persona dressed as Alexander the Great in a traditional "foustanela", half-crazed and removed in his own world, he broke the aesthetic barriers of Modern Greek art and pointed to a new direction of unique self-expression. The generation of the 1930s owes a lot to his work.