PAVLOS

Pavlos (pseudonym of Paul Dionyssopoulos), born in 1930 in Filiatrá and died on 16 June 2019 in Athens, was a Greek artist.

He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1949. It was not until 1954, however, that he really discovered painting during a trip to Italy, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

On his return to Greece, he became an advertising and set painter and discovered the art of the poster.

He arrived in Paris in 1958, just as the Nouveau Réalisme movement was being created. The new urban environment in which Pavlos was immersed drew him away from painting. He began to use cut-up poster paper and worked on the effects of density, colour and the relief of the edges. He followed the internal logic of his material and discovered an essential element of his artistic language.

Pavlos then distinguished himself from the “poster artists” of the time (Hains, Villéglé, Rotella) and was noticed at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1963 by Pierre Restany, the inspiration and theoretician of the Nouveau Réalisme. This encounter opened up new horizons for him and was to determine the direction of his future work. He was to meet Calder, Giacometti, César and Yves Klein.

But Pavlos’ work soon evolved, and he abandoned abstraction and the baroque to explore the possibilities of a new expressiveness. By making his strips suggest the shape of everyday objects, Pavlos moved away from New Realism and closer to Pop Art. Nevertheless, he remained a free electron of the art world and never joined any movement.