In summer, we perceive communication with plants more. Perhaps due to our concern for their care during the holidays, the sudden loss of a veranda or yard due to the heat, the realization that they are fellow travelers who brighten our lives. In recent years, indoor plants have come into vogue, a little piece of nature has entered and settled in our homes. Others, of course, realized very early on that this cohabitation had a lot to offer. The artist Antonis Staveris, for example, has always been a lover of chlorophyll, he liked to live and observe plants as silent, gentle creatures that have something to teach us.

In 2010, the late Panagiotis Thetsis singled out with his sharp eye one of his paintings depicting his terraced mosaics and flower pots and nominated him for the Athens Academy Award as a New Artist. Perhaps it was this recognition or just the psyche of the visual artist that made him continue to paint flowers and plants, alive and cold-blooded. “The impression of this subject on canvas is almost like meditation, a process that causes the purification of the soul,” he admits. “The bottom line is that all plants are different, they have different essences in space, different characters, and in everyday life it’s really a little magical to see how they develop, the cycle of life itself,” he adds.

So, the time has come to donate some of this “harvest” with the exhibition currently on display in Hysternia, Tinos. In this famous village of marble craftsmen and artists, Staveris exhibits 11 works from an old elementary school that was given a second life when the last student left. The tribute is part of the municipal festival of Tinos and is called “In Color”. “When I was younger, it seemed to me the most difficult to draw flowers or trees. With great difficulty, I later managed to make a silhouette of a tree in a night cityscape, and so the knot untied.

Until the end of August, he widely presents portraits of indoor plants in unexpected color combinations in Isternia. In the compositions, the main characters are stems, flowers, leaves, harmonious or naughty forms that nature gives to these organisms. In a different aesthetic style and execution, some of the black-and-white watercolors depicting vegetal compositions suggest a more abstract mood, but true to the painterly character of Staveris.