Mario Prassinos

Mario Prassinos was born in 1916 in Istanbul to a Greek family who immigrated to Paris in 1922 to escape the persecutions of the Ataturk regime. His father’s rich library introduces young Prasinos to the artistic and literary movements of the time. In 1932 he studied at the École des Langues Orientales. At the same time, he frequents the backstage of the Theater Workshop of Charles Dullin and the atelier of Clément Serveau, and creates his first works that are distinguished by their surrealistic features and reveal his special interest in the emergence, deconstruction and reconstruction of images of the subconscious and the memory. In 1934 he studied at the Faculte des Lettres in Paris and socialized with surrealist artists and poets. In 1936, the year his father dies, he begins to abandon surrealism, learns engraving and makes his first attempts at creating portraits of animals and people like Bessie Smith. In 1937 he exhibited at the Salon des Surindependants alongside Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and André Masson, and the following year held his first solo exhibition at the Billiet-Pierre Vorms gallery. In 1941, returning from World War II where he had volunteered in the French army, he settled in Paris. Some time later he became friendly with Michel, Raymond and Gaston Gallimard as well as Raymond Queneau. Then begins his long-term collaboration with N.R.F. publications. in the context of which he illustrates books by Jean Paul Sartre, Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Camus, Arthur Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe and other authors. From 1948 he exhibits regularly at the Galerie de France in Paris and in 1949 he acquires French citizenship. In 1951 he buys a house in Eygalières, Provence where he will focus on designing tapestry and producing paintings based on the observation of nature and experimenting with the drip technique, using overlapping lines and spots of ink on paper as a way of rendering the impression of an image. From then on many series of works will follow and in 1961 Robert Lapoujade will shoot the film L’image et le Moment dedicated to his work. Another central part of his career will be the portraits he produces more systematically from 1962 until 1975. These are peculiar portraits of Lysander’s father, his grandfather Pretextat-Leconte and other personalities that are sometimes represented abstractly, having replaced the density and the outline by the accumulation of marks and by the use of successive lines and layers, and sometimes by design with distorting interventions and associative allegorical references. Next thematic units he will tackle are Paysages Turcs (1970 – 1981), in which he captures fleeting figures from orchards, gardens, meadows, groves, forests and forests on large surfaces using black and white to emphasize the difference between nature, of his work and objective reality, and Les Arbres (1980 – 1984). In 1983 his retrospective exhibition was organized by the Presence Contemporaine in Aix-en-Provence, and in 1984 by the Musée de la Tapisserie in Aubusson, by the Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, and by the French Institute in Athens, Rhodes and Thessaloniki. In 1985 he breathed his last in France. His last works were the Peintures du Supplice completed in 1986, for the Notre Dame de Pitié Chapel in Saint-Remy, Provence. In the same year, the Donation Mario Prassinos collection was inaugurated in the same space, with 108 works that he himself donated to the French state in 1985. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and art galleries located in almost all European countries and in the USA . In addition, he has designed sets and costumes for performances that took place at the Avignon Festival, the Theater National de Paris and La Scala in Milan, and in 1961 he was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts of Luminy in Marseille. He has written texts and books on art such as Les Prétextats (1973) by Gallimard and La Colline tatouée (1983) by Grasset, and has been awarded the titles Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1961), Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (1966) and Officier des Arts et des Lettres (1981). His works remain in the collections of the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum and the MIET in Athens, the Center Pompidou, the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Fond National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musee Picasso in Antibes, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, MoMA and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and many others. In 2005 the monograph Mario Prassinos was published by Actes Sud publications.