By Venia Pastaka

Art Historian

The exhibition “The Word and the Place” by Dimitris Sevastakis, professor of painting at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens, is on display at the National Library of Greece from November 27, 2025, to February 28, 2026. It is a series of works inspired by literature and the painter’s birthplace, the island of Samos. The exhibition is divided into distinct sections of portraits and landscapes, which in turn are divided into smaller categories. Portraits of fictional heroes, readers, creators, landscapes painted from life, and landscapes painted from memory. Sevastakis’ images mostly emerge from a deep blue color like poetic impressions that teeter on the edge of a dream. His painting is not abstract, but there is a surrealism in his themes. His enigmatic wolves projected in the water and under a full moon, the faces that also emerge from the wrinkles of the sea, intensify the mystical feeling of the works.

“Lonely House,” 2020 – 25, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm.

The artist’s exceptional design skills are evident in the creators’ designs. The figures of poets, writers, and visual artists are presented as they are, without any embellishment, with a directness that reveals the painter’s respect for them and their work. In the painted portraits, where color prevails over design, the figures are transformed into small psychograms: the gaze, the posture, even the chromatic vibrations function as hints to the inner world of those depicted. The landscapes of Samos constitute a second, equally essential axis of the exhibition. Sometimes bright and clear, sometimes immersed in an introverted melancholy, they do not simply capture the natural space of the island, but also its memory. Coastlines, trees, entire landscapes that emerge through intense strokes of color become carriers of a personal geography. Here, the place does not function as a backdrop, but as a living subject with which the artist converses.

The exhibition at the National Library Greece forms a comprehensive narrative in which text, myth, memory, and observation are woven into a unified visual universe. With sincerity, technical precision, and deep lyricism, Dimitris Sevastakis presents works that invite the viewer to see how place and language shape his painterly gaze.