Every time one attempts to study the case of Tinos Dimitratos as an artist, one stumbles, perhaps because one hesitates for a while with the project. Before him, many paths open up, varied and equally fascinating. He will follow them all, perhaps “lost” at their intersections, and from the beginning he feels a strong fear but also the relief that there is no turning back, no distancing and no revision. He knows that he either enters this planet with a passport to the passion required or he remains a non-existent, ostensible spectator. And this last, equal to suicide for a scholar, is not suffered by science. Therefore, the journey to the land of the images of Ginou Dimitratos seems without end, without end. Here from the beginning the axiom “one cannot observe and meditate in order to understand, one participates and proceeds” is clearly defined. And what is the first impression? Everything in this country is burning, bright, red as blood, and in the middle of it all is the invader’s fire, alive and large. In it one begins to know how tensions are inflamed, how complementarities are crushed, how coexistences are sacrificed. The smoke of the flame is blown away by a crystal wind that blows clearing the great temperatures. The harmonies resound, the new world trumpets. Through the windows of Tinos Dimitratos’s speedy, the volumes, the shapes that grow and breathe, can be seen. The world geometric, cubist, well-weighed, volumized, segmented, dissected, fluidized, EXPLODED. Its cosmogonic pieces are transformed into flows, uninterrupted flows, many internal, internal, external, palpable. Their steaming moisture exposes the earthly forms of a realism that weeps. Hidden, behind other colours, red is hidden, the red is weathered. It prepares, as always, the new cosmogony, the new path and its vein beats now here, now there. The creator’s lens focuses where the beats define him, on the human sphere, and seeks the climaxes of pain, of joy, of human cries that change the world. He recognizes and records in the faces of toil and struggle, the psychic tensions of the flame, the crimson of blood, of life. Small and large stories are illustrated, powerful compositions of a world mortal and immortal, human and supernatural, real and imaginary, symbolic and idealistic, always full of associations, encounters, encounters, a world unified and unique. Sensitive and emotional, the artist’s lens steals snapshots of human earthly beauty in all its forms, even cruel beauty. It is honest and narrative.

He tries to rescue in the vastness of time his own drops of great intensity. His images, arks of explosions, like flaming beads are sent out into the universe to be attached to his embroidered tail. So it is with great human art. The Art that arises from difficult, rough paths and leads to paths of many demands. Its weight has long ago kindled the fire in its creator , to which it will succumb. The Art that is, like Faith, a bridge to what does not belong to us and far surpasses us.
Ginos Dimitratos has received the gift of this knowledge and experience. His fascinating aesthetic discourse and his own works will accompany the Ionian cultural heritage as a valuable, priceless, asset. Often reversing and subverting with his choices – media, expressive modes, etc. – the dictates of the modest approaches and interactions arising from the Corfiot tradition in painting, he was a bold innovator for local art. Moreover, he was one of the outstanding representatives of the modern trends of his creative periods in our country: in the inexhaustible reservoir of his artistic production one can find elements of almost all the trends of the 20th century in conversation, which makes him an exceptional artist. A charismatic teacher of art, he imbued his students in education for decades with a great unquenchable passion for the visual arts, passed on his knowledge with remarkable conscientiousness and perseverance, and was the main inspiration for many of our young artists at the beginning of their careers and later on. A heroic, irresistible scavenger of change, he cultivated with his attitudes and his rich work the contemporary aesthetic perception in Corfu, turning it to new, for the times, choices, always expressing with courage his positions outside his studio and within society. A deep and sincere lover of creation, he promoted the importance of its role in every circumstance in the social dialogue as well as its function in the political system. Politically sensitive, he has never ceased to advocate the ideas and principles of solidarity, world peace, social justice, education and the well-being of the peoples of the Earth. For the Corfiot art, therefore, his personality and his work as a whole constitute and yield, undoubtedly and forever, top features and characteristics in the formation of its modern physiognomy.

Kerkyra, issue 6o, December 2017
Maria Melenti
art historian