Valerios Caloutis Biography
Valerios Caloutsis, born on the island of Crete in 1927, passed away in 2004.
After studying at the art school in Athens, he moved to England in 1952. In 1953 he moved to Paris, where he studied fresco painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. Calousis exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in the early 1960s, and it was before one of these exhibitions that the artist was interviewed by Mervyn Levy. In a subsequent article published in the "Studio" entitled "Ego into Art", Levy wrote: "(Caloutis) is an abstract painter, but one who has long sounded, and dismissed as merely fatuous, the banal possibilities of those forms and styles of abstract expressionism that do not move quickly in the province of discipline and order. He has abandoned the formal clothes of the studio. He uses neither an easel nor a palette, preferring to work from fragments of broken glass on which he spreads his colors, often gold; silver or bronze paint. He prepares a stiff mix of plaster bound with glue, lays his painting surface on the floor and, with a set of trowels, painting knives and pieces of wood, creates a pattern of thick, beautifully raised surfaces on the canvas. structured and marked.” Consistency is of primary importance. “I'm interested,” he said, “first of all in the texture. I want to create surfaces that the viewer feels compelled to touch."
Caloutsis is represented in the permanent collections of art galleries in Melbourne, Australia and Toledo, USA. His work can also be seen in the common rooms of Worcester College, Oxford.
