MATISSE 's famous painting, "Grand Intérieur Rouge", can serve as an illustration. It is no longer a matter of light being treated in a traditional way, but of an interior of a uniformly red colour. If an inattentive reader can confuse the terms colour and light the viewer must respond to the evidence: a crimson colour spread uniformly over a white or yellow background covers four fifths of the canvas. only a black stroke (one cannot call it a shadow here, for there is nothing to shadow) allows one to make out a wall, a floor, a table sketched in perspective, within this sea of red. To speak of light in this case constitutes an abuse of language. Would one speak of light with regard to a red background laid flatly on an Egyptian funeral fresco ?

MATISSE 's use of simplification constitutes as ingenious a brainwave as Columbus's egg: it consists in eliminating a problem rather than solving it.

The "flats" introduced by the Fauvists and the Cubists in the " synthetic" period doubtless avoid having to resort to figurative illusion, but they eliminate the very notion of light and consequently that of its counterpart - shadow. In the heady delight that marked their freedom from the conventions of traditional style, the avant-garde successively rejected perspective, composition, representation, colour and graphics, in short, the inspiration of the work. In the wake of this process of stripping away, painting had to rediscover its path, disengaged from all outside and superfluous support, and acknowledge only that which reflected its own reality.

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Let us look at how YATRIDES deals with this problem. In his canvases we find gradations of colour between planes, mass determined by the graphics, surface zones either illuminated or dark, but, strictly speaking, there is no shadow.

The objects and the figures are set in a universe that is shot through with LIGHT. They themselves appear to reflect or, what is more, radiate an inner light, but their presence does not create a shadow.

Thus we are faced with a paradox :  YATRIDES  has  fully  mastered  the  effects  of  LIGHT, or rather he has accorded LIGHT the possibility of investing itself in relations, which until then existed neither in optical reality, nor in pictorial fiction, and he did it without having recourse to its counterpart :  shadow.

Renouncing the prolixity of chromatic expression, YATRIDES had accorded to light that same freedom accorded to colour by the Fauvists, in pure tone.

It can be said that, from  the  fifties,  YATRIDES  has  challenged  the  identification  between  light  and  colour  laid  down  by  the Fauvists,  and  which  they  exploited  to  the  benefit  of  colour.  Lie  has  done  so  to the  benefit  of  light.

(See in his "Life" -  "Entourage" Paul PERROUD :  YATRIDES ' researchs at C.E.A. (Atomic Centre of Studies), C.E.N.G. (Grenoble Centre of Nuclear Studies), in the Offices for Special Application of Physics, Paul PERROUD Director, Doctor of Knowledge and Philosophy at Berkeley).

It was his response to the challenge posed by the "primitives" and the "barbarians" at the beginning of the century, a response of capital importance which was to allow the rediscovery of fundamental qualities discredited by the whole of the avant-garde pictorial venture.

IN  A  UNIVERSE  SHOT  THROUGH  WITH  LIGHT

PARTICULAR  LIGHT,  INDEPENDENT  OF  VOLUMES  AND  COLOR,
WE  ARE  FACED  WITH  ANOTHER  PARADOX :

Objects  and  figures  do not project
shadow.
What  is  more,  they  radiate  inner
LIGHT

[ Yatridès and other people ]   [ Picasso - Yatridès ] [ Vélasquez-Picasso ] [ The Biblical Icons - Yatridès ]

[ Léonard da Vinci ] [ Raphaël ] [ Botticelli ] [ Menzel-Manet ] [ Matisse ] [ Gauguin - Yatridès ]

Extracts from following documents and works :
Official Authorities : "Administrative biography"

Arthur Conte : "Yatridès master of time" SGL 04.03.1991
Sacha Bourmeyster : "Yatridès and his century" , "Yatridès the painter of the invisible reality" ,
"Yatridès, l'anti-Picasso" SGL 24.03.1994, "The Interstellars Icons" SGL 31.03.1994,
"Yatridès and the Bible" SGL 30.10.96
Monographic catalogues 1954-1993 : Exhibitions and Retrospectives YATRIDES
Monographic catalogues : "International Biennials art festivals" Canada-France from 1987 to 1993
(Great Master guest of honour -Grand Maître invité d'honneur)
Events, Schools of painting 1900-1959, 1910-1960, 1910-1965 : USA Events achievment held with works,
of which Yatridès ' paintings, lent by US important prominent Private Collections of the United States
(See "His work" and in "His life" : "Bibliography")
Films, Videos, University theses : YATRIDES ' work has fascinated film-makers, movie-directors, semiologists,
among the best of our time.
See in "His life" : "Entourage" in which appear   "Jean DELANNOY",  "Marcel CARNE" famed movie-Directors,
 film-Makers   and  in "His work" :  
"YATRIDES - KUBRICK".

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