In the final analysis, this fact indicates the absence of a life stance, a stance which Michel Foucault defines as something related to the ancient Greek ethos "a voluntary choice that certain people make" and then adds, "a manner of thinking and feeling, of transacting affairs and behaving, which signifies a reference to the space to which one belongs, but at the same time is self-projected as a duty" (Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment Greek edition, Athens: Erasmos 1988, p. I6).

But the concept of duty, taken in this sense, also introduces the ethical criterion as something valuating human activity. The lack of ethics leads to fragmentary and splintered actions; conversely, its presence imbues human actions with cohesion and inner coherence. We are thus led to a point of view regarding the evaluation of works of art, one in keeping with which, "valid works ate characterized by the existence of inner cohesion, a sum total of indispensable relationships obtaining between the various elements which constitute it and (in the most important of these works) between the content and the form. This inner structuring results from the fact that they express, on a level of cohesion vigorously advanced, the spherical attitudes of the human being to the fundamental problems raised by inrerhuman relationships as well as the relationships between the human being and nature" (Lucien Goldman, Dialectical Inquiries, Greek edition, Athens: Gnosis 1986, p. 133-134). I would add a third relationship to the ones mentioned: that of the human being with his own self. Goldmano is a true sociologist and always promotes the collective at the expense of the individual.

These three questions, that is, interhuman relationships, relationships with nature and the individual's relationship with his own self, ate what Dimosthenis Kokkinidis has persistently dealt with throughout the entire course of his artistic career. But the degree to which the one or the other is in the ascendant in any given period of his activity as a painter, determines whether the artist approaches his art with a mote sociopolitical, "natural", or existential/metaphysical attitude.

Tackling the problem of classification in this manner, I have then divided the artist's entire oeuvre into three large groups-: the sociopolitical, the natural and his relationship to it and, finally, the existential/metaphysical. In the context of this general classification, there ate found the separate entities themselves, which in agreement with the titles that the artist has himself given them, can be arranged as follows, in relationship to the three large groups I have just mentioned:

A. Sociopolitical Space (Interhuman Relationships): The Early Works (1958-1960), Neighborhoods-Cyclades (1960-1964), War-Violence (1964- 1967), "memory of evil times" (1967-1968), Identities (1968-1974), Motherhood (1968-1974), Protests (1974-1981).

B. Natural Space (Relationships with Nature): Seas (1981-1987), Mythological Associations (1987-1992).

C. Existential-Metaphysical (Relationships with Self): Trial of Transcendence (1992-2000).

If the above classification is based on a national content, this is done out of loyalty to the artist, for he is not a sterile formalist who abandons himself to the contingencies of form. In his work there is always, whether manifest or not, this inner sense of necessary appertaining between the content and form, a quality which provides his work with that deeply desired inner cohesion which Goldmann looks for in valid works.

Kokkinidis begins to paint knowing what he wants. He finishes up by also including what he needs. If the "I want", that is, the will, relates more to the thematic content, the "I need", that is, the necessity, emerges in the course of the work, through form. That is why I prefer to leave it for the end, as the End, as the aim which also constitutes the quintessence of the pictorial work.

To the above influences I would add two events which I consider made a definitive contribution to the formation of the style of the artist I am examining. The first is his stay in Lesbos, where he studied post-Byzantine painting and the folk painting of Theophilos, and the second the two months he spent on Mt. Athos, where he was duly impressed by the "purity of color" fund in Byzantine art, as well as the greater freedom of expression in the painting in the illustrated manuscripts, as compared to that in the wall paintings. So, the human figure, purity of color and freedom of expression are the three elements which have left their mark on his work.

But what can Moralis, Tsarouchis, Diamantopoulos, Courber, Theophilos, Matisse and Byzantine painting possibly have in common?

On a very abstract level, on the order of intellectual structures, these represent the solidity of form achieved by means of outline or color. And this happens whether we are speaking of the classicistic robustness of the Three-dimensional forms of his teacher Moralis, or the realism of Courber, or finally, the two-dimensional crystal-clear and fat, colored surface which by means of Matissse, and Theophilos for that matter, Tsarouchis and Diamantopoulos made use of.

Finally, in Byzantium the artist would find them both co-existing: the solidity of the inscribed and two-dimensional form, in combination with the clarity of color. A color which, however, expresses another meaning than the divinely appointed, as it were, outline, of the natural form. Here the color separates the depicted event from the material world and turns it toward the transcendent-that is to say, it gives it meaning in a different way.

Kokkinidis would be led by the above outlined "intercourse", to the painting of pure color entities, which by themselves convey a visible, or intelligible, outline or limit. His color composes, organizes, and produces structure; it does not "destroy"-his brushstroke is subordinated to the surface. Here is where the classicism of form is in part concealed.

But before I turn away from this juxtaposition of morphological influences, I would like to pause for a moment at the influences of Courbet and especially the Burial at Ornans, which I consider to be more ideological than morphological. In his work Neighborhood, Kokkinidis is making a reference to Courbet. Selecting a group of working class individuals here, not beautified in any sense, he automatically has informed us of his political point of view. As in the Burial at Ornans, the protagonist is not an individual but a social whole-an anonymous collection of suffering human beings. In this case, the beauty is rendered by means of truth. The solidity of the figures make this an absolute truth, while the geometric abstraction, rendered bv means of color, makes it archetypal. Commencing with this work, Kokkinidis would begin to experiment with abstraction and indeed with one of the most basic elements of modernism: the blunting of the difference between content and the space containing it. Here, the space is not understood as a preexisting concept which has to be represented, but something that is built up by the act of painting itself . Front here on, he would be constantly moving between these two poles: the figurative and the abstract. This is a form of abstraction, however, where even in its most advanced form, a recognizable need for representation is always implied.

The social character of these works is also expressed by the relative absence of nature, even in the Cyclades. Wherever it appears, it constitutes merely the field where human activity takes place, expressed on the pictorial level by a painting surface that is right-angled and rationalized, centripetal, where the straight line and perpendicular axis of the structure are the dominant features. The outlines, in the more figurative works, are unambiguous. The colors are true to local characteristics: the browns, ochres, deep greys and greyish blues of Piraeus and the white, blue and grey-blues of the Cyclades, with red for Sfageia. With the assistance of these colors he would here become even more engaged with abstraction, which from then was to become one of the structural characteristics of his art. But Kokkinidis' abstraction, I repeat, never led to the complete absence of recognizable form. It is, for all intents and purposes, a structural analysis of form, a lesson in gradual abstraction, so that the reference to the form found in external objective reality is never lost. And because in this entity the external reality refers practically in its entirety to the social space, it is only natural the abstraction must be focused on it, as the main characteristic. Thus, in the most abstract works from this entity the most is thematically involved with human figures projected onto the surfaces of houses, using more browns for Piraeus and more white and grey-blue for the Cyclades. Where the outline exists its significance varies from case to case. So when the work is dealing with a built environment, settlement or harbor, the line is for the most part solid, expressive of the solidity of the objective world. When the artist is dealing with human figures, then it appears to be more tenderly inconstant. Is he in this manner trying to express the fragility of human existence, taken as a part in relation to the "solidity" of the social space, taken as a whole? Or is he perhaps expressing the potential of the human subject as opposed to the definitive materiality of the world? These are the ambiguities Kokkinidis is so fond of, where he cannot accept the definitive and the accomplished uncritically, and always looks ahead to the transcendence of what appears, at first glance, to be a given reality. I have the impression that this tendency toward transcendence, which is yet another of the unvarying features of his work, is to be found symbolically, even hesitantly, in one of the most moving works in this entity: Woman In Front of a Door. Against a light blue background, squeezed between the slate-colored tarred roof which descends threateningly, and the greyish-beige of the earth, is depicted the intercourse between human being and nature, something that will come to dominate his work much later, after 1989. This intercourse takes the form of a woman and a flower. The woman's legs, a terrestrial element are brown, rooted in the earth. Her face has the same chromatic relationships as the flower. A white brushstroke traverses the plant with the same luminosity, as the woman's blouse. This white brushstroke appears to be hurling out a message which the human being is unable to receive, and thus nature and the human being remain imprisoned in a built space, with no communication between them.

I think that this white brushstroke is of meaningful weight inversely proportional to the space it occupies, a gravity that will emerge as the artist's work evolves.

At the same time, clear references to the cultural past of Greece contribute to the tragic nature of the fact of violence: references to the Crucifixion, the Epitaphios Lament enacted over Christ's Bier, ancient Greek tombstones, and to the dirge intoned by women's chorus in tragedy. All of these things take place against a blue-grey background which becomes white for Grigoris Larnbrakis, and a turbulent yellow for Vietnam. Yellow as a racial reference to Vietnam but at the same time a reference to the brilliant light of Greece; it is almost as if the artist himself was amazed at what could happen in such light -"everything within the light", as he hesitantly states in the bottom left hand corner of one of the works. Sometimes this yellow takes on a greenish hue and then becomes expressive of the corruption and grief that violence occasions. Kokkinidis knows how to give meaning to his pictorial means as the case demands.

In the Courts, the human figures, the Judges, are in some places depicted almost completely figuratively, while elsewhere they are abstract; they are purposely deprived of an outline, which reduces them to a state of potential dissolution. They are human puppets - indeed one of them is missing an arm, so it seems like a mechanical construction: these are faceless individuals, victims and victimizers simultaneously, just as the judges were during those seven years, not daring to oppose the military authorities. Figures, which down deep are dead, without the energy to resist, projected on a ghastly background, in sickly greyish pink and greyish blue.

The structures, Kokkinidis' boxes, are expressive of the junta's violence, on a level of pure form. The meaning of the box, the violently squared-off forms, as well as the squared-off human figures it contains, become expressive of the sense of incarceration and violence. A claustrophobic violence of the squared-off and rationalized human space -the violence of what has been strictly defined and accomplished as compared to the potentiality of human subjectivity and nature.

Here the human figures, male primarily, arc solid, clearly demarcated in their color, in the colored social space. Conversely, the female figures, that is, the private space in the present case, are dominated by slender and tenderly vibrating outlines. This is a model of existence for a politically oriented couple during those seven years. A man who has been sentenced and a woman who has also been sentenced, in her own way; enduring, suffering and supporting. Thus the private space of the soft outline, the feminine place, blunts the harshness of the right-angled social space, that is, the male space. When the fact of male and female coexistence takes place in the closed private space of a room, then the delicate outline covers both of the human figures. A transistor radio expresses the only possibility there is for communication with the reality -let us never forget that Greeks learned of what was really going on in their country, during the seven years of dictatorship, from foreign stations. A blackened, turned-out kerosene lamp becomes an expression of the absence of light while a matchbox with the emblem of the junta oil it reveals the cause of this absence and is indeed a thematic counterpoint the match being a bearer of light.

Although Kokkinidis uses counterpoint again and again, it is not merely for aesthetic purposes. He does this because he considers it to be the basic component of life itself. This is perhaps a deeper awareness of the dialectic where each thesis carries within it its own antithesis and so on and so forth.

In the work called Self-Portrait, his own profile is shown with a soft mobile outline, face to face with a harsh right-angled figure, violence. Both these figures are red on a hot yellow background though for his own he makes a partial use of blue as well. We can see for ourselves that the outcome of the relationship of red and yellow in the right-angled figure is an aggressive one while his own one is soft and steadily defensive. The common denominator for both is a blue elongated surface with a delicate white stripe, a far-off echo of Greece itself. But the preeminent blue part of the work, the blue of the sky and the sea, is not allotted any of the violence. He keeps this for himself and uses it as a threat against the violence. The real that threatens to erase the fictive -the blue, in the Greek collective unconscious, is in fact more real than the yellow.

The dominant figures are the mother and child. Equally dominant is the absence of the father, the man, who commanded the previous entity. This absence, however, leads Kokkinidis to question and express doubt about the event of birth itself. He asks himself about the world that the new human being is coming into. The negative side of this world is stressed with the suggestion of a male presence through the use of a photograph, and therefore his absence. The negative aspect is also implied by the turned-out and blackened kerosene lamps, and the transistor radios, but above all, it is expressed by the bars on the child's cradle which rocks between protection and imprisonment. Is this not perhaps because all forms of protection can easily be transformed into just such containment? That a caress from a maternal hand is not only tenderness, but a form of aggressiveness. On the point of contact between the hand and child's face, the dividing lines disappear, while the young boy is shown without arms, a condition that leaves him unable to act, something also stressed by the "binding" stripes on his shirt. Is this due to the political situation alone, or is it at the same time a matter of libidinal economy? The meanings in Kokkinidis alternate and the one is contained in the other almost like a free association.

Thematically speaking, this entity contains two sub-entities: in the one collectivity, groups of human beings, plays the leading role, while in the other the main figure is the speaker in front of a microphone. Starting with the former, we can ascertain that the human figures, set within a lavish chromatic background made up of blue, red, and yellow, are difficult to tell apart, to the degree that one asks oneself if this chromatic background is producing them or absorbing them -one wonders in the end, whether the specific protests are a process of discovery or loss. I think the latter prevails. The accessories of political protest, that is banners, flag-poles and microphones, appear to hold away and to build the space and cultivate the impression that the alienated individual has been reduced to the symbols of his ideology. Kokkinidis does not hesitate to demolish these symbols, with a tendency, toward self-mockery: thus the banners are tossed about the space in disorder. But he also does not hesitate to demolish the symbols of his art: the painting frames, empty, intermingled with the political banners, are expressive of his inner turmoil, of his questioning of art itself; he is faced with the fear that the symbol might come to replace the flow of life. The right-angled shape set in opposition to the complexity of what is potential.

The juxtaposition here of hard and soft outline, along with the elements of light and dark, the juxtaposition, that is, of violence and the protesting individual, does not have the keenness of the preceding entities; one would think the external enemy, mocking, has triumphed by becoming more internal, when the protest itself constitutes a danger, namely that of the absorption of the individual by his own ideology, which of course is then transformed into a constraining form of reasoning, a dead symbol.

This situation deteriorates even further with the second thematic sub-entity in Protests the speakers in front of their microphones, where the microphone is what dominates while the human figure is shown as uncertain and frightened, a "mouthpiece" for the microphone which appears to have replaced the speaker's mouth.

In the most abstract of the works from this entity, the suggestion of a human figure appears to have been broken to bits by the aggressiveness of the acute-angled shapes and the multicolored stripes, elements which we have encountered in the preceding entities, either as symbols of confinement or as the poles holding political banners. The fact of their collapse, of their dissolution in all directions, contains a great danger: the sweeping along of the individual into dissolution to the degree he has identified himself with the symbol. The enemy is now internal.

The artist will express the need to transcend this situation discreetly, if not indeed hesitantly. In one of the more abstract works in this sub-entity, the white brushstroke appears that was first encountered in Neighborhoods. It appears "without reason", as a tendency to escape from the work, from whatever is going on within it. And since according to the Nietzschian maxim, "one must divine the artist in order to understand his image", I would say that escape in Kokkinidis is more an escape to something than away from something; that is, it is a quest. It is the Nietzschian question, which gives priority not to "free from" but "free for" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Greek edition, Athens: Dodoni 1983, p. 104).

In Seas, Kokkinidis now confronts the watery aspect of the world, and why not, the formless, but the one that contains all the potentials for form. I would even venture to say, that abandoning the world of ideologies the Reason which gives form, he then becomes involved with Matter which is the basis of every form. That is, with existence before form, wherein "matter is the unconscious aspect of form. It is the volume of water itself and not the surface which sends us the persistent message of its reflections. Only a material can receive this load of multiple impressions and feelings. It is an emotional good" (Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, Greek Edition, Athens: Chatzinikolis 1985, p. 57). And although vision is adequate when dealing with form, at least in the accustomed usage, matter itself requires all the senses. Kokkinidis' works acquire here a tactile sense. Because "this dominance of water over matter is not fully intelligible if we content ourselves with visual observation. A tactile observation needs to be added [...] a tangible experience added to the visual observation." (Bachelard, ibid., 113). This "burrowing" of the human figure into the fluid environment, is not a matter of vision alone, and perhaps not at all, but an experience that the artist struggles to transform into vision. The body is once more restored to the womb that gave birth to it, to nature, either literally absorbed into the symbolic form of the sea, or metaphorically through the form of embrace and loss that the one experiences in the other -when we get right down to it, is not any form of embrace equivalent to the open sea and a sense of loss within it? A longing for union is dominant, of this "unconscious yearning to return to the blissful tradition of the universal bodily surrender of infancy" (Anna Freud, preface to: Marion Milner, When You Can't Paint, Greek edition, Athens: Ellinika Grammata 1988, p. XXII).

Such an order of experience however, one so powerful, gives Kokkinidis the impetus to speculate even further about his art. The appearance of painting frames in his works expresses once more that self-mockery he evinces when dealing with his own painting. It expresses the fact that life is beyond and above all Reason and art never ceases to be a form of reasoning about life. Thus bodily integrity lies outside the imaginary painting frame, while on it, the body dissolves in colors, in suggestions of existence and indeed, formless.

In the works from this entity, human figures, trees, houses and animals are shown and indeed, horses, the archetypal symbol of energy, something between wild nature and civilization, which coexist, but are seeking out ways of communicating: this slender chromatic line which tends to connect everything plays a leading role here. Because coexistence does not of necessity mean communication. Kokkinidis seeks communication in all directions, not only in nature but in a metaphysical space as well. Works such as Sacrifice and Invocation, with a human figure in almost complete dissolution before the unknown infinite, express something of this nature.

The human being is no longer the center of the world, he is a part of the world along with all the rest. His aim is the reestablishment of communication, or rather the social sense of community, of whatever goes into the make-up of the world. Nothing is given, except for the things themselves as autonomous entities. The human being is obliged to advance on to an interpretation, to the meaning of the world, and to go from there to relationships and other combinations. As Claude Lévi-Strauss points out, "if we reach the point of believing that what takes place in our mind is not something essentially and fundamentally different from the basic phenomenon of life itself and then are led to feeling that that kind of unbridgeable chasm does not exist, the one between the human being on the one hand and all the other living creatures on the other -not only animals, but plants as well- then perhaps we will acquire much more wisdom than what we think we are able to acquire" (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, Greek edition, Athens: Kardamitsas 1986, p. 61-6?).

Kokkinidis will turn this human quest into a symbol by means of the sea for yet another time. An element which in the Greek's collective unconscious is identified first and foremost with the Journey, both literally, and figuratively. It is not fortuitous that these works centered on the sea, refer in their majority to the Odyssey, the symbol of human adventure. And since to leave is somewhat the same as dying, the journey always has an aspect of death to it. This sailing over the sea, this deep blue of the Kokkinidian cosmic womb, hides the danger of the loss of form, of the formless, that is, death. Here the oblong white surface first encountered in Neighborhoods plays the leading role, conceptually hovering between understanding and departure. But this is a question of a voluntary death, by means of which the individual is reborn. Because "it is obvious that the benefit of travelling is not sufficiently tangible to have impelled prehistoric human beings to build a boat. No benefit can justify the enormous danger which the journey over the waves presents. In order to flaunt these dangers a sea voyage requires powerful advantages. But the truly powerful advantages are the chimerical ones. These are the advantages derived from our dreams, not the ones that can be calculated. These are the mythical advantages. The hero of the sea is a hero of death as well. The first sailor is the first living human being who was as courageous as a dead man, because long before the living gave themselves over to the waves, did they not put a coffin in water, leave it to be carried away in a torrent? In this mythological matter ...] death then becomes not the last, but the first journey. For those who dream profoundly, it would be the first true journey" (Bachelard, ibid., 78- 79). In actual fact too, because the adventure of human knowledge, of essential knowledge, shows us that the new, the unknown, can be acquired only if one accepts departing from the old. And these departures conceal successive metaphorical deaths.

I have the impression that this wisdom can be found concentrated in the work called Departure. The work is divided diagonally into a "stressed" and "unstressed" surface. In the former, on the first plane, there is a dominant spiral-shaped yellow thread, a symbol of life, with its repeated cycles. The one end, the beginning, is held by a female figure, colored green, the color of fertile nature. The other end, the actual end, is held by a young man, colored white. Everything is projected on dark blue except for the man's torso which is projected on the off-white sail of the boat. In the other half of the work, the "unstressed" part, a black boat is the commanding figure, the one used for the "departure" of the title, that is, the one Charon guides over the dark waters. The end of the spiral thread is extended upward on its off-white sail. Only at this point the thread becomes multicolored, just as the prison bars in Identities were multicolored, lending a concealed hope to the end, the hope for another beginning.

Next to the boat, as a counterweight to the form of the standing man, is a kind of telegraph pole on which is hanging a thread, an unconnected wire actually, descending from above. The two threads are parallel to each other thus expressing two counterbalancing motions, from below to above for the spiral thread and from above to below for the "wire", which as it gets closer to the pole, itself tends to form into a spiral.

At first glance, and in agreement with the title, the artist is here dealing with the End. It is just that it is certain Kokkinidis would not stop at the literal meaning but, even if unconsciously, would charge the work with metaphorical meaning as well, of equal power to the literal, so that what is of concern to an individual life, acquires collective and ecumenical value, that is, it is made archetypal. It is the point where the individual unconscious meets the collective. It is also the way that Kokkinidis refines what he considers to be stable values.

But let us return to the work: a young man, is separated form the maternal, female figure, is separated from the green of a mother nature, and the blue of the sea womb. The thread guides him upward and thus his torso is projected on the off-white sail. From the deep colors of material nature he is led toward the ethereal ones. This course brings to mind a course toward an uncertain father with the simultaneous abandonment of the maternal hearth. But each abandonment, each parting, is the same as a metaphorical death in which is contained, potentially at least, the course leading to maturity, completion. Thus the literal end of the first level of reading, constitutes a symbolic beginning. The white of the young man is at one and the same time the color of life and death, of swaddling-clothes and shroud. By extension, the meaning of the work is also subverted. The "stressed" part becomes darkness and the "unstressed" one light -the beginning becomes the end and the end the beginning. That is also why the spiral is the symbol of life. Within it both beginning and end, arrival and departure, whether literal or symbolic, are seen as the parts of a greater whole, of Existence. The meaning of this manner of existence, is now something achieved, not given. This is the consciousness of an existence, which also includes the experience of death. Thus, in this specific work, the one spiral, the yellow one, is ending, while the other coming from above, is waiting to begin.

Following this line of thought, it seems to me that the body of the dead gull on a beach reproduces the boat used for this particular sailing, as its wing has the shape of a sail.

With this entity, Kokkinidis completes his speculations on human existence. The human being as culture, the human being as nature, and the human being as metaphysics. In the first two entities he puts the questions: "What am I" and "How do I exist". But in the last one he puts the question: "Why do I exist". The content of this question gives this entity a character more existential, more metaphysical. And, as is natural, this question, humankind's most basic one, cannot be answered if death is ignored. And I do not think it is by chance that in this last entity of works, Kokkinidis has given us the most "panoramic" views of the Cosmos. Because "to look down from on high, is the same as looking at things from the viewpoint of death. In both cases, the gaze is liberated, distanced, with composure and objectivity, just as they are in themselves, repositioning them in the infinity of the universe, within the wholeness of nature, without giving them the false prestige which is usually attributed to them by human beings and human conventions." (Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Greek Philosophy?, Greek edition, Athens: Indiktos 2002, p. 283)

So what does Kokkinidis' creative course, taken as a whole, mean? If the artists of his generation, that is, the Sixties generation, can be schematically divided into those who stayed in Greece and those who went abroad, then Kokkinidis belongs to the former.

But the whole concept of "Staying", for Kokkinidis, has meant a choice of a life stance, that is, an ethos. And the fact he remained here puts him, in regard to his painting, in a state of constant intercourse with Greece on every level. In terms of his painting, this intercourse signifies a meaningful art, the result of an intellectual artistic activity. That is, an art which theorizes that form, the signifier, is of necessity connected to the signified, with the content, which is not the obvious content of a theme, but first and foremost the content of the form and material of painting itself. The content of the pictorial language itself, in other words. For that reason, Kokkinidis would also be led to an abstraction which never concludes in mere sterile formalism. He would never make an art of the signifier alone, one, stripped of meaning that is, a course which has led modernism into an impasse. This endeavor to make his pictorial forms meaningful can, in general lines, be found throughout his career as a painter. Thus, in the first large group of works, where he was involved with the sociopolitical space, a product of human reason, we found ourselves confronting a space that is finite, right-angled and centripetal, the vertical line the axis of construction. In the second group, where the relationship of the human being to nature is dealt with, the space becomes potentially infinite, centrifugal, with the curve holding sway, and the axis of construction the diagonal, sometimes expressed and other times not, while at the same time the style was modified, going from fixed to fluid. Finally, in the last group, the most existential and metaphysical of them, all the above characteristics coexist as a reply to the separate questions from the two preceding groups.

And in all three of these large periods, we have been able to ascertain a tug-of-war between representation and abstraction, that is, between the objective and the subjective. Seeking an equilibrium between the two, between the collective and the individual, and having a profound awareness of the European tradition, he surrendered objectivity by and large to the drawing and kept color, for the subjective part, for himself. This simultaneously conscious and unconscious struggle between the collective and the individual, thus establishes Kokkinidis as a profound humanist, in the tradition of European classicism. This he would prove with the texture he achieved through his use of color. Despite the fact that the latter is considered to be the supreme "non-rational" and lyrical element, nonetheless his brushstroke never destroys the unity of the surface. This process is more obvious in the first group, less in the second and obvious again in the third, but achieved in another manner, and it led color to the suggestion of organized forms, to the suggestion and not the representation of an outline, that is, limits. In the artist's hands, it becomes the preeminent tool for giving meaning, in the framework of the most important human quest, the harmonious coexistence of the part with the whole.

His humanism would also be shown in the choice of his subject, and not only in the use of his materials, despite the fact the latter is the most important for a pictorial work. Thus, throughout his entire oeuvre, the human figure is always to be found as follows: in the social space it is dominant, while in the natural space it forms a part, along with the rest, of a broader whole, of nature, which again, as a whole, transcends it. Finally, in his metaphysical inquiry, Human Being and Cosmos coexist, reciprocally giving each other meaning. Here even Nature is only a part of another whole, of the Cosmos and of the Cosmic Mind. In the end, the harmony of the whole always exceeds the part, that is, the surface exceeds the brushstroke.

Through this constant speculation on the relationship of the human being with various "worlds", social, natural, and metaphysical, Kokkinidis also gives meaning to the difference of style of the cosmos and the human being. Thus, the human figure nearly always shows a more fragile brushstroke, in distinction to the surrounding "world" with its compact surface; one would say he wants to express the fragile, the potential of human subjectivity, in contrast to the definitive nature of objectivity.

For the above reasons, and by means of his particular chromatic classicism I think that the work of Kokkinidis stirs up the whole question of "Greekness", on a much deeper structural level while at the same time it constitutes an answer to one of the most important aesthetic questions, which is thus formulated by Goldmann: "the real aesthetic problem does not lie in knowing what technical means the artist makes use of, but conversely, and first and foremost, why these means are the most suitable ones to express his particular view of the world" (L. Goldmann, Structures Mentales et Création Culrurelle, Paris: Anthropos 1970, p. 417). But this answer presupposes both "means" and "world view", that is significant form. And of course, that will take place, only if the question of «Why Do I Exist» is raised, which sweeps along in its wake questions concerning every human activity. At this point, a space opens for ethics, for an ethical stance which in the current condition of the western civilization seems more valuable than the spiritual culture. This struggle has occupied Kokkinidis in his work and continues to do so. He summarizes it in the following words: "The problem for the present-day artist, and for every responsible spiritual creator as well, is not how to produce values or to renew the world of forms, but how to participate as an individual in the remolding of human relationships." That is, how meaning is to be produced. In the final analysis, this is where the internal cohesion and authenticity of Kokkinidis' work lies. The true creator can be found here.