Click here to see pictures from the opening reception.

Christos Koutsouras: Reflections of Sea and Light,  an evocative exhibition, included seven new paintings, an installation, and a retrospective of Koutsouras’s work. In addition, Editions Limited, Big Car and iMOCA partnered on a one-night show opening night in Big Car Gallery, featuring an additional 10 new paintings. The exhibitions are the result of his return to the United States and feeling “home” for the first time in Portland, Oregon.

At the heart of the exhibition is his desire to return to the sea. Koutsouras spent his childhood diving, sketching and reading about the ocean. He left his home on the island of Samos when he was 17 and became an ocean navigator. When he was 25, he gave up sailing to study art. In 1996, he came to New York where he met the mother of two of his children, an Indianapolis native. He and his then wife moved to Indianapolis in 1998 where he had studios at the Murphy Art Center and Harrison Center of Arts. “I ripened as an artist in Indianapolis.” says Koutsouras. He left Indianapolis in 2005 to move to Seattle.

After a two-year plus break from painting, Koutsouras found the studio in Astoria, Oregon he coins “Big Red” and began painting again. Right on the Pacific Ocean, the space rocks with the waves and howls during storms. “It’s immediate it touches your skin when you hear the sound, and the wind goes through the cracks.  You can’t be depressed. You are there dealing with it, transforming it into a drawing or painting,” he said.

Through a wooden installation in iMOCA, he’ll share with Indianapolis the spirit of studio — complete with sounds captured there during a storm. Koutsouras hopes the Indianapolis audience will find refuge in his work the way he has, connecting to each piece the sense of place and security he feels in the studio.

“When I found my studio, I finally felt at home in America. After 16 years I don’t have any thoughts of going to Europe. I used to carry my passport always on the run,” he said. “Not anymore. I hope the pieces will resonate on the same level they do to me.”

He captures his newfound solace by focusing on the color grey and with a new approach to creating the work. “It came piece by piece. Usually I work on two to three pieces at a time. But for this show, each piece is a progression of the one before, one is referring to the other whether it is from the line or the progressive wave,” he said.

And he starts each piece thinking of the color grey. “There is always something in the shade of grey,” says Koutsouras. “Once you get the grey right you can go everywhere with it.”

Read  NUVO art critic, Dan Grossman’s review here.

NUVO coverage of Koutsouras here.