Spiros Baras
Longing for Summer
02 (Tue) - 14 (Sun) December, 2025
11:00 -18:00, Monday closed
The exhibition will feature works by the Greek artist Spiros Baras, including pencil drawings and several watercolors. The drawings by Spiros Baras reveal a world of soft restraint and luminous stillness. Executed with colored pencils on textured paper, they share a distinctive delicacy, a refusal of heaviness, of shadow, of noise. The artist builds the image through countless fine layers, allowing color to breathe through paper rather than sit on top of it.
His subjects range from island landscapes and architectural views to intimate portraits and gentle scenes of daily life. Each appears distilled to its essential tone, sea, hill, skin, or air, suspended in a timeless calm. The light is diffuse, Mediterranean yet introspective, and the figures seem to inhabit a space between memory and dream.
Despite their simplicity, the drawings contain a precise emotional charge: a faint melancholy, a longing that resonates with the exhibition title “Longing for Summer.” They evoke moments when the world slows down, a cat sleeping, a woman lost in thought, a church glowing on a distant hill, and invite the viewer into that same hush.
Baras’s minimal palette and deliberate flatness echo early modernist sensibilities, yet his atmosphere is unmistakably personal, contemplative, humane, and deeply tender.
Baras’s watercolors could also be seen as a meditation on transience, on how light touches the world for an instant before disappearing.
Within the context of the contemporary art scene, Spiros Baras occupies a distinctive position, one that resists spectacle, digital excess, and conceptual overstatement. His work reclaims drawing as a meditative, sensorial act, standing in deliberate contrast to the acceleration and visual saturation of contemporary image culture.
At first glance, his compositions may appear aligned with minimal realism or post-minimal figuration, yet their ethos is more poetic than stylistic. The absence of shadow, the restraint of color, and the near monastic precision of mark-making recall certain tendencies in post-photographic painting and new sincerity movements, a return to intimacy, tactility, and the everyday.
Baras’s imagery, modest houses, still bodies, animals in relaxed poses, engages with the idea of stillness as resistance. In an art world dominated by irony, noise, and political spectacle, he cultivates a mode of attention that is profoundly humanistic. His light, almost evaporated surfaces create spaces of contemplation where memory and place coexist without hierarchy.
While many contemporary painters exploit materiality to the point of excess, Baras’s practice is defined by subtraction, the decision to let air, silence, and the paper’s own breath participate in the work. In this sense, he can be seen as part of a broader tendency among contemporary European artists to revisit the aesthetics of slowness, aligning his sensibility with figures such as Peter Doig, Giorgio Griffa, or even contemporary Japanese artists who privilege atmosphere and nuance over assertion.
Ultimately, Spiros Baras represents a countercurrent to contemporary visual culture. His drawings are not nostalgic retreats but subtle proposals for how to see again, slowly, softly, and with care.
Featured Works
Spiros Baras
Downloads & links
Spiros Baras (b. 1977, Athens, Greece) is a visual artist whose practice centers on drawing and watercolor, exploring perception, atmosphere, and the subtle presence of everyday life. After earning a Diploma in Graphic Arts from Sivitanidios School in Athens (2002–2005) and a Certification in Digital Art from the University of the Aegean, he began painting and exhibiting in the early 2010s.
His first public presentation took place in 2010 at Technopolis, Athens, in the exhibition 35 Artists Exhibit Their Works on Global Poverty, where he showed his work alongside established Greek artists. Since then, Baras has illustrated three books, and his artworks have been featured in several public spaces.
In 2013, he relocated to the island of Syros, where he founded and continues to direct Plastico Café-Gallery, an independent meeting place for artists, musicians, writers, and friends. The space functions both as a gallery and as a cultural hub within the Cyclades art scene.
Despite his deep roots in the European tradition, Baras emphasizes the crucial influence Japanese art has had on him. Speaking about his experience of interaction and recognition, the artist offers revealing insight into his intellectual and emotional relationship with Japan, adding an important contextual layer to his practice. He situates his work not only within the aesthetic lineage of ukiyo-e but also within the broader dialogue between Western modernism and Japanese visual philosophy.
In his own statement, Spiros Baras traces his evolving relationship with Japanese culture - from early misconceptions to a deep and respectful understanding. His honesty about initial misreadings (imagining tattoos and shunga as common domestic motifs) underscores his self-awareness and humility as an outsider engaging with another tradition. Rather than aesthetic appropriation, his approach becomes one of study, reflection, and homage.
Baras’s artistic path mirrors the trajectory of many Western modernists who were transformed by Japanese prints, yet his process unfolds with a contemporary sensitivity, acknowledging not only the influence of form but also the ethical and cultural context of that influence.
Ultimately, his statement reveals Baras as an artist of cultural empathy. His drawings are acts of attention, and his tribute to Japan becomes a study in how looking itself can be a form of love.
Education
Diploma in Graphic Arts, Sivitanidios School, Athens (2002–2005)
Certification in Digital Art, University of the Aegean, Greece
Selected Exhibitions
2025 Does Art Influence Everyday Life?, Cyclades Art Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2024 Syros Island, G. & E. Vatis Art Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2023 Drawings and Watercolours (solo), Plastico Café-Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2022 Drawings and Watercolours (solo), Plastico Café-Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2019 Retrospective (solo), Plastico Café-Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2019 Awagami International Mini-Print Exhibition, Inbe Art Space, Yoshinogawa, Japan
2018 Visual Approaches to Greek Poetry, Ano Syros Cultural Center, Ano Syros, Greece
2016 Immersion into Digital Culture, Cyclades Art Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2014 Invisible Islands, Cyclades Art Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2014 Open Studios, G. & E. Vatis Art Gallery, Hermoupolis, Syros, Greece
2010 Testamento (solo), Centro Filarmonico Comunale, Savoca, Sicily, Italy
2010 35 Artists Exhibit Their Works on Global Poverty, Technopolis, Athens, Greece
Books Illustrated
2013 Rainworms, written by Samuele Livornese, illustrated by Spiros Baras
2015 La Virgola, written by Laura De Luca, illustrated by Spiros Baras (La Vita Felice, Italy)
2024 La Solitudine del Derviscio, written by Samuele Livornese, illustrated by Spiros Baras