Dionas Vangelis

Vangelis Dionas was born in Piraeus in 1954. From 1971 to 1974 he worked with the painter Giorgos Vogiatzis.

In 1981 he graduated with honors from ASKT, where he studied painting with Yannis Moralis. At the same time, with a scholarship from the IKY, he attends the workshop of fresco painting and the technique of portable images with teacher Kostas Xynopoulos.

He has collaborated on many book editions with original engravings and edited illustrations for poetry collections and magazines.
Since 1983 he has been teaching in secondary education as a Fine Arts teacher.

A student of Yannis Moralis at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Vangelis Dionas studied fresco painting and the technique of portable images under Kostas Xynopoulos, and has presented his efforts, both in group and individual exhibitions in Greece and abroad. But his painting seems to be moving in a personal direction that proves his close contact with all the pursuits of contemporary art. And there is no doubt, as evidenced by his older and newer works, that his painting has visual reality as its starting point, without limiting itself to the simple transfer of its external elements. He always aims and succeeds in conveying in his efforts a purely free and personal interpretation of it, which stands out for its persuasiveness and expressive richness. “If you look at some of his most characteristic works from the last period, you can easily see the defining characteristics of his painting language. And these are expressionist touch and lyrical mood, calligraphic types and evocative general atmosphere.
What is easily noted in Dion’s works is a fertile and personal composition of abstract topography types and in some cases an energetic expressionist mood that gives the painting energy and an expressive pulse. Without being interested in preserving the known elements of his starting point, which is visual reality, he manages to give ensembles that seduce the viewer in their path and spirit. The interpolation of linear calligraphic types used to organize and enrich the painted surface gives clarity and expressive fullness. By emphasizing sometimes a vertical axis in the middle or a horizontal one at various heights, or painting it acquires new expressive extensions. Another point, where the researcher cannot help but dwell, is that of the difference in expressive content in the large and small surfaces of Dion. And this difference is easily noted if one comes closer to some of his most characteristic efforts.
In the large surfaces with a preference for heavy black colors, which are intensified by a few interjections of warm tones, a generally passive atmosphere and pessimistic content prevails. Perhaps in this case one can speak of a kind of critical treatment of the modern reality of the big centers and especially of Athens, with its smog, polluted atmosphere and all kinds of contrasts and conflicts, elements that tend to annihilate the individual. Even the shapes themselves, with usually the same dimensions of width and height, come to emphasize the same impression and to complete more clearly this climate of pessimism, which is introduced by heavy colors and the emphasis on horizontal general themes.
On smaller surfaces or using the combination of cold and warm colors and passive and active elements, they give a different tone and a more optimistic content to the painted surface. This is also emphasized by the preference for vertical subjects, where from the very shape in which the height prevails over the width, and the ascending or moving elements in the center, come to give another voice to the painted surface. And this one is more lyrical and poetic, internal and optimistic. A greater use of linear calligraphic types in this category of works, there is no doubt, that it enriches Dion’s painting language with new expressive extensions.
A painting in contact with the conquests of modern art, that of Dion, but based on purely personal searches, moves in the climate of European abstract expressionism, better known as tassism. This is a painting that stands out for the imposition of color values ​​and the expression of the artist’s inner encounters with our time and our world. Without attempting to simply convey familiar types and established elements, he imposes himself on the viewer with the honesty and safety of his expressive language. With the immediacy of color and the role of space, the possibility of submission and the authenticity of its formalities.

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