SAINT LUKE THE DOCTOR

The intensity of color, as diffused in his religious paintings, highlights an emotional charge in the figure of the Saint. The painter makes the face of the Saint present, in an effort to make him a familiar person and thus facilitate the viewer's encounter with him. The Saint's gaze is sometimes inquisitive and penetrating and sometimes kind and direct, without any shadow. At other times, again, it gives the impression that the Saint sees much beyond the viewer, towards the area of the metaphysical, the sacred and the afterlife, an area to which the painter also gazes. One could say that the artist achieves this by utilizing the language of painting, colors, light, poetry. He also seems to be interested in illuminating the viewer's soul, inviting them to an experiential approach to faith, hope and love. He recites his "visual poem in visionary and heroic sounds, preserving the ancient Greek spirit immersed in the spirit of Christianity, but also of enlightenment and modern history and art... ...Warlamis' religious paintings of Saint Luke touched me deeply. He paints hope, has a spiritual vision and shows, through his art and the example of his life in the direction of the search for the sublime, the light, the overcoming of historical family and personal trauma through friendship, love and forgiveness. I also believe that Warlamis expanded the spirit of reconciliation in the direction of bridging the rift between Christian churches. He worked for this to the best of his ability, anticipating the union “….into one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church……”, but always remaining faithful to Orthodoxy, as expressed in the Creed.

…in the end, the artist, with absolute chromatic abstraction, expresses the holiness, the incorporeality, of the Saint, as his form hovers above the earth, the light itself on its path towards the heavenly light, God. Efthimios Warlamis struggled with this light in his life. An admirer and pilgrim of the Saint, he tried to approach it, to become a partaker of its mystery, to understand it. He calls the series of works he dedicates to Saint Luke “The Mysterious Light of Miracles”. The miracle that was the whole life of Saint Luke, the miracle in the soul of the artist, the miracle that can happen to every believer, as he seeks “the shining light of divine love”.