I never moved away from certain goals which I perhaps unwillingly set for myself. That is to defend the truth, to fight against injustice and to praise beauty in all its forms. Despite my attachment to these values, I have doubts on the first two of them.

In 1989 when I painted the Libra of the Zodiacs in Vata, the Cultural Center in Greece, I showed justice under two figures. Later, I executed two large paintings: Justice I and Justice II. In those paintings there are three figures. Two of them disillusioned, laying strewn on the ground, and the third one standing up, triumphal and trampling the others. In fact, the third figure could be in its turn bumped by a fourth one and the latter by a fifth and so on. In my view, the idea behind this depiction symbolizes the lack of justice. As for Truth, I also think that it does not exist.

This loss of trust is distressing. Finally, what is left for me is Beauty and I cling to it and look for it everywhere: visualizing at an object, observing a flower or a bird, an animal or a building. Searching for beauty does not consist of seeking instinctive satisfaction under the ascendancy of desire and sensual pleasures. To be able to see the beauty, to hear and transmit it on canvas is a sublime act. Even when I paint the suffering in my massacres, my figures are depicted in an aspect of beauty. In Berlin, a person in charge of one of my genocides' work blamed me for the beauty of my figures. I told him that my aim was not to paint cadavers in order to move the audience. One can touch them with the beauty of the victims, sad yet beautiful, suffering, exhausted, sick yet beautiful. The victims were not cadaveric during all the phases of the genocide. Why should one show the ugly in beautiful people? The person in Berlin thanked me for these explanations and we became friends.

One should look for and find beauty everywhere. Once, a well off educated woman who had seen my African statues asked me: "How can you live with these ugly sculptures?" I answered that one has to find beauty in ugliness.

We always have a tendency to look for epithets. Beauty is not the opposite of ugliness. Ugliness indeed exists also, but when nothing can be done and all effort is given up. It exists in spitefulness, lying, violence, crime, torture, rape. Briefly, it exists in all actions against nature.

Beauty elevates the person morally, spiritually and transports him or her in a fairy world, to a state of catharsis. I try thus to paint beauty, in pure abstraction or in real figuration.

People who do not give up the search for beauty feel and live always young.

I like children's painting, because they ignore all about its teaching. In general, one cannot teach painting, because teaching means communicating one's own point of view. Children are spared false ideas and conclusions that we have about painting. A child is free to express himself or herself without prejudice and far away from habits and false visions which we acquire through the years.

When I came forward to work in two distinct ways, the abstract and the representative, I was wondering if I had the right to do it. This painful doubt made me suffer deeply to the extent of crying. But today I enjoy this fact, because I have doubt about everything. I am not sure of anything. Thus I reject prejudice, certitudes, preconceived ideas and I can say that I even reject thought. When I work on abstract painting, thought has a minimal part. I let my feelings, my spontaneity and my explosions flow as if the painting was produced by automation. It is not the same way with representative work. One loses part of his freedom, thought gains ground on spontaneity and free expression recedes. When one starts to doubt progressively, one gets away from thought in the field of painting, even though thought is so important in regard to other forms of expression. As far as I am concerned, the more I doubt facing my canvas, the more I feel satisfied and enjoy it. I have the feeling of liberating myself of a kind of slavery, even if it entails that the world could judge me later. I do not know if what I do presently is valid or it is rather a failure. Yet the fact that I do not know gives me wings and carries me even farther, speeding along incertitude and in this way having easier access into the unexpected. All this is for me an incommensurable adventure.

If I feel the least amount of doubt in my abstract or representative painting, I will change the ensemble of my composition even if it could mean the disappearance of some beautiful effects as a result of this change. But the final result is always accompanied by new effects and additional surprises. Chance plays an important role in the development of the work.

Progressively, in the course of years, working simultaneously in two styles divides me also in two, and I feel and live in two distinct manners. At the beginning, this duality of personality disturbed me. I did not know where I was. Then I started to feel myself present in three if not four different directions. This fact has given another perspective into my painting.

Once, when I was painting on Fashion, precisely on lingerie, I felt ashamed facing the beautiful model of my work and I thought about misery and killing which might happen somewhere in the world at this time and a war vehicle appeared suddenly behind the figure of the model, and so on, and so forth, the same phenomenon occurred on other paintings. I ended up with two themes instead of one.

In the past, when I witnessed atrocities I was painting the massacres. Today, two themes revive on the same canvas. This is again a new expression, a new manner of living and seeing, split up in two, in three different facets. And I am afraid to see myself, at the same time in different locations, different states of soul and feelings and different frames of mind.

Under no circumstances do I feel I could lecture on ethics. I am sensitive and pick up totally opposite signals, away from each other which I interpret separately and simultaneously at once and in the same moment. Today I do not separate those perceptions which I reproduce in the same canvas and which obey a law evermore present in me which is to live several lives at the same time. I am sensitive to all which happens to my fellow humans, be it close to me or at a distance and instead of losing the sense of my freedom, I try to double my sensitivity and enlarge the field of my vision and my expression.

The artist paints alone, immersed in silence. The silent communication conveys, through color, the accomplishment of his work.

Omiros