To show the beauty of usual objects. Such seems to be the ambition of the Greek painter and sculptor Dionyssopoulos Pavlos .
At the age of 19, Pavlos begin Fine Art school in Paris, a city in which he could settle thanks to several scholarships he obtained. This Paris of the 1950s is then that of the New Realists. He attended sculptors Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Alberto Giacometti and César (1921-1998), as well as the famous art historian and critic Pierre Restany (1930-2003), whom he met at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1963.
In the studio in the rue Vaugirard next to that of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), he gradually moved away from painting and began working with cut-up poster paper. Driven by the plastic potential of this material, Pavlos thus elaborates a unique vocabulary of form.
Pavlos (Pavlos Dionyssopoulos) (1930-2019)
'Baroque, 2/1966'
Résult: 80 600 €
The work entitled "Baroque 2/1966", sold by PIASA in 2019, bears witness to the plastic research he undertook at that time. Drawing facetiously from the iconographic vocabulary of classical painting, the artist cuts thin strips of newspaper of different colors that he assembles into an abstract composition. The quasi-organic forms of this type of work call the viewer's attention to inflect the relationship he has with a reality that is, to say the least, strange.
To be distinguished from the Affichisme movement from which it is nevertheless inspired, this technique of cut paper was already present in his work 'Bottins téléphoniques', created in 1964 and sold by PIASA in November 2016.
PAVLOS (Pavlos Dionyssopoulos) (1930-2019)
'Bottins téléphoniques', 1964
Result: 38 640 €
However, Pavlos' abstract compositions gradually gave way to an iconography composed of everyday objects, clothes and accessories.
At the frontier of Pop Art, Pavlos' work met with some success during its first American presentation at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1967. The early 1970s were marked by a series of paper installations, including a set of 26 trees (the Forest), presented as part of the artist's first retrospective in Hanover.
PAVLOS (Pavlos Dionyssopoulos) (1930-2019)
'Cyprès, 1991'
Result: 13 524 €
As a free spirit, Pavlos was a craftsman in bringing together art and life, the artwork and its audience. Contemporary of a culture that mummifies art, his ambition was to influence the viewer's gaze in order to bring a new world to his consciousness.
