About The Artist

Diamantis was born in 1959 in Drama, Greece and currently lives in Kavala, a city of northern Greece. As far back as he can remember he has always loved painting. He never took any classes in art schools, and therefore considers himself self-taught. "I assume that Caravaggio, Velasquez and Rembrandt are my teachers."

Diamantis focused his studies on the theory and history of art.
During his childhood he used to copy the classic painters in order to learn how to paint. Diamantis was provided with books of art, which he studied continuously. In that period he was mainly influenced by the Surrealists Dali and Magritte.

He created his first compositions with the influences of surrealism and symbolism. From 1985 he started his first attempts on abstract compositions. In 2000, felling lost, he decided to follow the basic instructions of experienced wayfarers who state that, "As soon as you feel that you have been lost, the wisest action is to follow your footsteps backwards until you find yourself in known places."

Therefore, he started to travel back to the constant values of the grandmasters. Diamantis deeply studied the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Paulo Uccelo and Piero de la Francesca, attempting to captivate the ineffable merit of the work of the masters. He was trying to arrest the quintessence of painting.

He tried to use sand and glue in order to create a surface on canvas emphasizing the colors and lines with this rough texture.
The station of this route is his painting Did Rembrandt knows Altamira?, an artwork which is now held in a private collection. Looking at this painting, someone could see the Night patrol of Rembrandt painted on a rock surface of a cave, while someone else may see an abstract painting with various colors that resulted in a classic piece of art (as, according to the theory of chaos, a chimpanzee pressing randomly the keyboard of a typewriter has the possibility to write Shakespeare). Others could see a derived cave painting of Altamira, which when Rembrandt faced it with its matte colors, he painted his classical work.

Although his artwork appears abstract, nothing is random, except the wet color. The lines dance across the canvas composing abstract figures, reminding the viewers of familiar scenes moving at the edge between the remembrance and oblivion. Therefore, the real meaning of the art is what cannot be said, the ineffability.