George Raftopoulos's paintings display a fresh energetic approach, hearkening back to his original concerns with mark-making. These new works have been given more room to breathe, movement and space allowing the eye to explore the path of the marks and also to find reprieve in large soft fields of colour. Interested with the accumulation of the process of this mark-making, we can observe the underlying structure, literally the bones of the painting.

Always moving on to a place I've never been, stepping through the clouds on the threshold of a dream.  - Woodmansey

After the technical accomplishment and finish of his early works - contained, organised, viscous, glossy, gory red things - George Raftopoulos is attempting, here, to switch off that part of his brain which controls and contradicts instinct.  He's unlearning the rules.  

His canvases are still "historical mind maps" but now, like Google Earth, we have a hybrid option combining formal map and anarchic optical reality.  Satellite reality.  

A couple of paintings in the current exhibition cry out to be viewed from an acute angle: tilted back on an easel or seen from far above... through the hovering, alert clouds (for example) of Cosmos II.  

Raftopoulos is charging off like an explorer, experimenting in several dimensions simultaneously.  The cool colourist who (briefly) loved flat grey and pearl white has now gone for intense fruity colours, berries and mouthwatering mango.  

Elsewhere, as in A Trip To Kangaloon, he makes a concerted attempt to represent the tangle of reality between the viewer and the vista.  The layers once contained in the canvas - in the fifty layers of colour and scratches, words and lines in his endlessly worked paintings - have broken their prison.  Their mooring.  

One thing the artist hasn't relinquished is his colourist eye.  There is extraordinary subtlety in the way a swatch of delicate olive - or a small field of complex pink - will hold the painting together.  The universe balances, cupped in the hand of Atlas. 

Chris Boyd,  Art Writer and Critic

Link to Excerpts from essay by Peter Pinson Professor

Link to Belle Magazine article