Dimitris Yeros composes scenes as silhouettes, creating environments that simultaneously evoke the brilliant light of day and the darkening light of night. The effect is magical. The painter’s light is multiple. While day merges with night from scene to scene, Yeros’s figures evoke a sense of historical time and a range of human emotions. The recurring motif is a running man. The running figure sometimes appears to have come from the ancient Mediterranean but is more often contemporary. The figure is sometimes youthful and unclothed, but sometimes mature, wearing a business suit. Sometimes winged and sometimes not. A running bird-man appears, though without wings. Do these figures run toward a known destination, or do they run because they lack any destination, any purpose in life?
In several compositions, above a winged running man, there are amorini armed with bow and arrow—cupids, gods of love. These amorini, contrary to the cherubic type, appear more adult than childlike. Their posture resembles that of the running man but oriented horizontally. Their wings seem to put them at ease, hovering in the air, while the running man, with wings or not, keeps running. In the composition entitled Memories, the silhouette of a pair of lovers envelops the silhouette of a suited, wingless man who runs under a crescent moon. Here there is nowhere to run, no space to fly. And there is no cause to run or fly, for the emotion of love—timeless—counteracts all pressures and constraints of time.
Richard Shiff is an American art historian who has served as a professor at the University of Texas and as director of the Center for the Study of Modernism. He has written books on artists such as Cézanne, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Georg Baselitz, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Marlene Dumas, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Chuck Close and others.