The word eidolon in Greek means “image”—a thing without substance, a phantom, a mental picture. This is exactly the impression conveyed by Yannis Kourakis’ small paintings, called “Eidola,” completed between March 1983 and January 1985, as they flickered and glowed on the walls of the gallery. The visual richness of these heavily textured, sensuously tactile, luminous paintings attests to Kourakis’ Greek and eastern Mediterranean heritage, a tradition steeped in the lavish, the sumptuous, the dazzling.

Kourakis is a painter par excellence, and a purist in the way he handles his medium—oil