ABOUT Giannis Kastritsis he digs in the mines of his existential descents. With his latest work in Art Gallery “Expression – Gianna Grammatopulu”released the vapors of his composition, in a mixture of matter and spirit, house and village, people and animals, with a mood of totality, starting point and destination.

On the first level, as well as in the basement of the gallery, Yannis Kastricis invites us to a new acquaintance with his inner world, with what he brings in the form of cowries, torii, fleece. He says that “many times during my long wanderings through the fields and between the mountains, I wondered what the animals were seeing and sought their help by following the paths they carved in the landscape.”

On large canvases there is a smoky-wet impression of plains and mountains. Earth colors, grey, rust, ancient earth, bowels beyond History. Yannis Kastritis organizes in his painting the tactility of silence and primordial wisdom, how he himself experienced these qualities, how he himself benefited from the smoky plains and anthropomorphic tree silhouettes. Animals-separate beings, animals-humans, animal-companions, companions and free and separate persons, a herd, a herd, an ark by Yiannis Kastritsis is one of the moving and essentially interventionist visual installations of recent years.

Yannis Kastritsis gives us his art from the depths of his soul. Projects are what they are. Honest, autonomous, with an umbilical cord. The ink of Yiannis Kastritsis is an exquisite work of landscape painting. But his clay figurines are also masterpieces of microsculpture and craftsmanship.

On the oblong table, a large procession of animals, sheep and goats, evokes floating Greece as an experience or a fantasy. Everyone is somehow connected, because a large herd of the most attractive clay, brown, black, gray flowers becomes a mirror image of the gift of life. “Just as shepherds use their passion to create a herd that suits them, so I tried with the help of clay to form each animal as a separate creature,” he says.

The lambs of Yiannis Kastritsis become holy. Their halo guides and protects them, their shape refers to fairy tales and legends, their flesh reminds of biological kinship. This is the mystery of life, a hymn to what unites man with animals. But apart from all this, the art of Yiannis Kastritsis surpasses any possible analysis of his semiology. It is a masterful art, an art based on sources, a movement of holiness and exaltation.