Athos Zacharias uses the grid in a totally new way for effects of velocity. His paintings offer a sense of vertiginous motion like a wall of posters seen close-by from the window of a speeding train.

Zacharias has been obsessed by the principle of the grid for a decade or more. In 1970 he had finished a group of powerful, immaculate black and white paintings that he refers to as his "cylinders." They had the massive presence of vertically rotating industrial forms.

In the next few years he altered the weight of his colors, working with pale tonalities, glassy sheets of atmospheric, light-reflecting blues and greys.

Now, his palette is heightened, evoking the incandescent, theatrical colors of commercials on TV or the colors of toys, debonair, gay colors that suit the cavorting forms that leap from frame to frame like a sequence in a Fred Astaire film clip.

He calls his present work "Abstract Illusionism," referring to the chance resemblances in the play of the brushwork, to landscapes, skies, waves, green peppers. "Mirage" is the relevant title of one of these paintings, a staccato sequence of rectangles in shimmering, orange glazes. "Flim-flam," with its flashes of red shadows, witty grace notes, evokes a ballet on TV. One title, "Home Movies," might apply to the show as a whole, indicating, as it does, his passionate preoccupation with animation, controlled spontaneity.

Athos Zacharias, as a painter, has serendipity: his colors and forms always charge into the right place at the right time.

-Elaine de Kooning.
Printed by permission of the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY.

Museums/Collections
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Kalamazoo, MI
Corcoran Museum, Washington, DC

Galleries/Shows
Owl 57 Gallery, Woodmere, NY
Nabis Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY
Jaski Gallery, Amsterdam

Awards/Foundations
Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, Best in Show, 1979
Longview Foundation, 1962
Southampton College, Festival of Art, Southampton, NY

Educational Institutions
Art Students League
Rhode Island School of Design
Cranbrook Academy

Professional Affiliations
New York Artists Equity
Westbeth

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Artists