Still Life with Grapes – Oikonomopoulos Iason

Biography
Born in 1943 in Athens, Greece, from a very young age, he fell into the world of work, practicing many and varied professions.
At the same time, he began to take painting lessons from the painter Takis Bakopoulos.
He then studied set design and costume design at a private school in Athens, For a time he worked as a set designer and decorator in various theatres in Athens as well as on television.
Although his performance in these art forms was considered successful, his love of painting was irresistible, prompting him to abandon them and devote himself exclusively to it. His paintings have been equally successful, so much so that today he is an established professional painter. His paintings have been shown in many solo and group exhibitions.
In his painting he has adopted a style related to the Baroque style, but adapted to modern Greek standards. I. Ikonomopoulos is one of the few painters who, in our multi-faceted age, continue the long and succulent tradition of classical art. With methodically architected sets, with clear contours, with the correct use of contrasts, with detailed narrative, he composes paintings that recall the incomparable achievements of the great masters of the genre. However, once, Dali, speaking to his young painter friends, said: “Don’t try to be modern. It is something you cannot avoid.” And so our artist, without perhaps consciously seeking it, but also without avoiding it, and always as a creator who lives intensely in our time, often presents himself as modern. In these cases, in some of his works, he manages to reconcile classical structure with modern expressiveness. It is a neoclassical painting that is likely to firmly define the future course of this gifted artist.
For all its academic morphology, his art effortlessly moves the viewer. It moves because it contains, to a fairly high degree, those elements that aesthetically charge the perfect painting: smooth description, topical scenes of life, evocative nuances. In the still lifes, our painter’s ability to project and submit his subject becomes even more noticeable . He integrates the details into a general whole where harmony, restrained lighting and an atmosphere of strict austerity prevail.
His works can be found in private collections of art lovers as well as in good galleries in Greece and Cyprus.