The power and autonomy of color in the painting of Babis Pilarinos do not prevent him from placing color and its properties at the service of narration.
A painter who, although ideologically and formally drawing his origins from Byzantine iconography, seeks to combine the serene aspects of everyday life with the intensity and lyricism of pure color and dynamic chromatic contrasts. He selects radiant yellows and ochres in order to depict the Greek summer landscape, where sunlight “burns” the fields and olive groves, boldly composing them with almost otherworldly, fairytale-like blue-green hues of the sky.

In his urban landscapes and panoramas, he employs colors that are at times equally luminous and at other times more subdued, always in proportion to the emotion the image is meant to convey. It is evident that Byzantine Art, with its exemplary compositional principles and chromatic canon, has endowed the painter with the necessary knowledge to manage color and drawing in a way that harmonizes them. Thus, although the artist favors saturated, vivid colors, the careful use of essential grays lends his works a sense of measure and harmony.

The choice of a uniform size and strict square surfaces ensures compositional coherence and homogeneity within his bodies of work, allowing room within them for thematic variety and tonal deviations. Another significant aspect of Pilarinos’ painting is the symbolism of his images. In most of his works, a “before” is implied and an “after” is anticipated, with the result that the pictorial moment constitutes the climax of a living narrative. Indeed, the suspension of time on the painted surface crystallizes key moments that expand the meaning of the images by integrating them into imagined narratives.

A recurring thematic motif is the embrace of a couple, as well as the presence of an animal (horse, deer, sheep, etc.), whose discreet appearance carries multiple symbolic meanings. At times, allegorical elements emerge explicitly, such as the figure of the radiant sun, the passage of multicolored clouds, and the appearance of angels and birds in the realm of the sky.

The totality and interaction of the aforementioned parameters render Pilarinos’ painting remarkable and timeless, as they allow it to oscillate skillfully between reality and dream. Babis Pilarinos, with evident influences from Byzantine icon painters, the Hellenocentric painting of the Generation of the ’30 (Kontoglou, Tsarouchis, Vassiliou, Nikolaou, Engonopoulos, among others), the chromatic sensitivity and provocation of European modernism, but above all with his personal and authentic painterly idiom, contributes to the renewal and redefinition of our visual tradition.

Kostas Siafakas
Painter – writer
Member of the Teaching and Research Staff (EDIP)
Department of Visual Arts, Athens School of Fine Arts
July 2025