Prasinos Marios

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Marios Prassinos was born in Istanbul in 1916, but grew up and studied in Paris, where he and his family relocated after the events of 1922. In 1932, he enrolled at the Ecole des Langues Orientales and began his first painting lessons under Clement Serveau. Two years later, he started his studies at the Faculte des Lettres in Paris, while both he and his sister Gisele, who had just published writings in periodicals such as Documents 34 and Minotaure, were already moving in the broader surrealist circles. Contact with people from the theater, designs and covers for publications, and his ongoing interest in transcending the boundaries between knowledge and insight, the physical and metaphysical world, as well as treating painting as writing, defined the main directions of his work. These elements shaped his artistic signature and prefigured the questions he would confront—from his early surrealist works, including portraits and self-portraits, to his introspective exploration of natural landscapes after he settled in Eygalieres, in the South of France.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1938 at the Pierre Vorms Gallery, which had discovered him at the Salon des Surindependants. That same year, he married Yolande Borelly. During the war, he began collaborating with the N.R.F. (Gallimard) publishing house, met Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and illustrated Sartre's Le Mur with color engravings. In collaboration with Raymond Queneau, he published L’instant fatal in 1946, decorated with his own engravings. The following year, he designed the costumes for Paul Claudel’s play Tobie et Sara, directed by Jean Vilar at the Avignon Festival. He would later collaborate again with Vilar in 1954, designing the sets and costumes for Macbeth. In 1951, he created his first tapestries and bought a house in Eygalieres, where he would live until his death. He became a French citizen in 1949.

In 1953, he illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven with woodcuts and copper engravings, and in 1955, he held his first of many solo exhibitions at the Galerie de France. When he traveled to Greece at the end of the 1950s, he had already begun to systematically study the landscape.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he held exhibitions in France and abroad, continued his involvement in publishing (in 1973, Gallimard published his book Les Pretextats), and worked with the world of theater, designing sets and costumes for the ballet Eonta by Iannis Xenakis in 1969. He was also named Knight of Arts and Letters and Knight of the Legion of Honor. In 1980, he exhibited at the Grand Palais the series Paysages Turcs (which he had been working on since the early 1970s) and Shrouds. In the following years, retrospective exhibitions of his work were organized in France and Greece, and one year after his death in 1986, eleven large paintings were installed in the church Notre Dame de Pitie.