Valia Calda
* The exhibition has been warmly embraced by the audience and is now extended until July 4th.
Skoufa Gallery is pleased to present Frangiskos Doukakis’ solo painting exhibition, entitled “Valia Calda”, on Tuesday, June 9th. The exhibition will run until Saturday, June 27th. The exhibition is under the auspices of the Region of Western Macedonia.
Frangiskos Doukakis’ new solo exhibition consists of thirty oil paintings, made in the last two years. The works reflect upon the natural beauty of Valia Calda valley, on Pindos National Park.
As Iris Kritikou writes in the exhibition text:
“Valia Calda is a group which was created without any pre-planned intent, but rose from an intense desire of the artist, who drew with a passion of feeling and soul, approaching the endless painted attempt of the grand impressionists both conceptually and emotionally.{…}
Frangiskos Doukakis’ love of the building-free landscape, which he first systematically attempted to document from the visual starting point of the Diomedes Forrest in Attica, found a passionate object of painterly fervour in the dramatic landscape of Valia Calda, where he found himself by chance a few years ago. The Warm Valley, with its primal name and with colours so organically primordial, that the painter had never seen their like: deep green of the centuries-old forty-metre-high black pines, which turn purple as the midday sun falls upon them; the violet explosions of clouds; the magnificent greys of Velasquez; the triumphal yellows of blossoming; the reddish brown deposits of ground with the sparkle of rust and iron pyrite. The pale blue mountain ground in spring and the blinding white of snow with its myriad variations of white. The eternally changeable god-imbued landscape of incomparable enchantment of form and light.{…}
In presenting this group of Valia Kalda paintings, with their sublime interchanging brushstrokes and their lambency transmitted by the basic unending form, Frangiskos Doukakis has proceeded to create an admirable achievement in painting along with a meaningful ecological message with a timely cultural and political demand. With a significant self-awareness-driven adventure in painting, with magnificent inventions of light and powerful gestural brush strokes. With horizons that are figuratively and literally so primordial, free and dynamic, that they sweep up viewers in a desire to experience them on site, with the need to experience their own visual and mental catharsis.
Valia Calda in mountain Epirus and in Frangiskos Doukakis also has a female aspect. And it has a wild, disordered and unexplored beauty, about whose external features and soul attributes we still maintain an Erebus of ignorance. But regardless, this is a truly magnificent endeavor.”
Find the exhibition e-catalogue here: https://issuu.com/home/published/doukakhs_web_fin
