In the summer of 2006, the spaces of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation in Andros were overflowed with colour and light, as the work of Panayiotis Tetsis (1925-2916), renowned exponent of the Modern Greek tradition in contemporary painting, was presented there, offering the public this great pleasure.

This elegy of colour was an attempt in revisiting the space and time of Tetsis’ painting, through a theme that we all hold dear, namely the sea. The sea as experience and memory is an emotionally charged space, around which developed a considerable part of the artist’s visual problematics and on which focused an equally significant part of his quest in art, already from the very beginning of his career, ultimately placing him among the genuine representatives of the Greek seascape tradition.

Tetsis’s painting treats this primeval theme in the spirit of the times, both avoiding stereotypes and radical breaks with tradition, taking it into its contemporary iconographic expression on the basis of rules and perceptions that took shape in the first decades of the 20th century. His seascapes are an ode to the Aegean, sea of light and of myths, sea of alternating colour variations and shades.