Μετέωρα

000008 Yannis Mitarakis, Meteora, 1962, oil on canvas, 67.5 × 83.5 cm

Around 1960, Yannis Mitarakis visited Meteora. Over the following years, until his death in 1963, he created several paintings inspired by the wild terrain of this distinctive region of Thessaly. In the painting, the artist adopts a frog’s eye view, a technique that allows him to convey the imposing presence of the rock. Perched atop it, almost vanishing into the clouds, is the Monastery of Saint Stephen. Nonetheless, Mitarakis was not concerned with the picturesque quality of post-Byzantine architecture, nor with the geological uniqueness of the landscape, nor with the monks’ desire to withdraw from the worldly. An atheist and a skeptic, the painter was above all interested in the visual allure of the landscape—the monumentality of the natural rock, the roughness of its form. These were the elements he sought to convey in his painting, adopting an abstract style for volumes and forms, favoring a new artistic expression with cubist references, emphasizing large surfaces and schematic representation.