Lefkochir, letters to Greco
Le Soir, (Mad), Danièle Gillemon, december 2003 (excerpt)
Even tough he was born in Crete (Heraklion, 1952), it’s in Belgium and in Liege that he has been continuing his oeuvre for many years, showing himself to Europe. The profession, according to him, has always been associated with a poetical and even social reflection (e.g. paintings that followed on a journey to Africa). This protects him from the absurdity of those numerous and insignificant amiable abstractions. His Oeuvre is nourished, dense, very identifiable, the sign of a personal language forged in a sacred friendship with the world which he praises as a personal religion. It’s never discarded of existential profundity where the vestige of reality is actually submitted to the incandescence of colours. Lefkochir has always dialogued with signs, placed light and colour in a tense relation, sometimes violent between the concrete form, even object, and the shadow, the darkness.
Nourishing his approach to the canvas from intimate dialogues with poetry and philosophy. This time it’s a painter that Lefkochir introduces to us.
El Greco, the fabulous artist of the 16th century, that also left his native Crete to settle down in a strange country, in Toledo.
Costa Lefkochir, at the museum and in the gallery
La Libre Belgique, Roger Pierre Turine, 2000 (excerpt)
Decipherer of the soul and eternity, Lefkochir is also and especially a painter. Because his palette is a receptacle inspired from his tensions, his desires, his impulsions, and the partition of his thoughts as well as his experience on the field.
He has a feeling for metaphors. Burning or reserved chromatic alliances. Incidental encounters between yellow and black, red and bleu, white and brown, red and black. The meaning of light, the tensions between the object and the colour. A cynicism that exclaims to the world it’s need to be tense.