For more than three decades Jiorgos Krallis has occupied a very special place in the art world of Sweden, the country where he has chosen to live and work since 1966. The adoption of the multi-voiced Thessalonian artist - painter, sculptor, engraver - by that northern land was not surprising. Right from the outset his work was distinguished for the originality, freshness and intelligence of application of ideas which, although nourished by the personal semiology of his birthplace, have been described by distinguished art theorists as "expressing an art that has no boundaries". (Bertil Andrén, Maja Nittymaki, Borás Tidning, Maas Dahlberg, Katarina Östholm)

Nor has this changed with the passage of time, for his ideas have consistently confirmed his inventive freedom in their realization. A perceptive observer as well as a romancer and expresser of easily intelligible impressions and memories, as attentive as he is perspicacious, Krallis was to produce works startling in their stylistic practice, replete with a world artfully staged to be wondrous, lightsome and fantastic, without depriving it of the impression that it could well exist.

With this as his point of departure and personal benchmark, he was to develop his idiomatic art in ingenious and inexhaustible variations, a compendium of all his experiences in which his scintillating spirit sought harmonies even in ideas antithetical to the whole.

Krallis was born on Plateia Aristotelous, in the historic center of Thessaloniki, and there; despite the hardships and miseries of the German occupation, he spent the years of his childhood and early youth, carrying out his own campaigns with nettles and stones against a rodent enemy. His journalist father, Nikos, was the agent for a German film company, and with him the boy early learnt the fascination of the cinema projector, the dynamic of rapid change, the shaping of image. The toy shop run by his mother in the busy Egnatia marketplace, on the other hand, provided him with an opportunity to learn at first hand about another magical world, a microcosm of elaborate designs and bright colors that were rendered even more impressive by their mechanical movements.

Shortly after the end of the German occupation the family moved to Athens, and Krallis completed the first years of his secondary education there, before returning to Thessaloniki to finish his schooling as a boarder at the American College.

Determined to pursue a career in the arts, he initially chose to study drama, stage design and cinema at the Max Reinhart School, and engraving at the Munich Art Academy. This was followed by one year of painting in Paris, and four years of creative design in Amsterdam, where he showed his work for the first time. He then postponed the next stage of his program for two years to return to Greece to do his military service, before completing his formal education (1966-1971) in the Graphic Arts department (engraving) of the Stockholm School of Fine Arts.

His military service brought him back to Thessaloniki, where he rented a room in an abandoned neoclassical mansion at the beginning of Vasilissis Olgas Street, opposite the seafront. The empty rooms in the house, the strange lodger in the next room who, as he later discovered once they had become fast friends, was an itinerant magician with a provincial circus, and the Fellini-esque (his description) family of an ancient bed-ridden crone with two unmarried daughters who lived on the ground floor in the company of an ever-growing army of cats, created a bizarre atmosphere that was also an inexhaustible source of contrasts, an atmosphere that created a powerful impression upon him and fired his imagination.

During this period (around 1963), cats featured in many of the works that he showed at the American College Club, as did, rats and mice. The intelligence and the cunning ruses displayed in their behavior during their midnight battles in the sad refuse tip of a garden behind the house inspired him to create images that, although light in subject matter, gave him the opportunity to transform with inventive elaboration the image of their reality into a mordant myth, a myth that functioned between the atmosphere of the mysterious and the wonder of life that exists everywhere, usually invisible to the large living machine of the adult world.

These were the motifs that were to predominate in his work, most notably in his engravings but also in his paintings, once he had taken up residence in Stockholm (1966). Enriched with other elements from his memories of the happy years of his childhood and youth, they were to become a powerful medium of expression, through which always ran a thread of nostalgia, the tender echo of a past that has become an inner reality. His works brought to life toys of every description, scenes from the circus, acrobats, clowns, illusions created out of the cheapest materials brightly colored cloth ribbons, balls, fur tails, the stuffed head of a hare with huge eyes - as he first saw them in the black trunk of his magician neighbor, insects and large animals - apes, camels, elephants, lions, giraffes. These series of engravings were to constitute the great group which he entitled "Circus Mundi", to which he devoted himself at that time and on which he continues to work to this day.

It is interesting to note that, before this decisive change of theme, Krallis had for 7 or 8 years followed the experimental spirit shared by most of his artist compatriots of the period. In a style alternately impressionist or abstract, he painted in oils and water colors maritime subjects (Fog, 1964), Greek island landscapes, rocks, flowers, thistles, even themes from mythology (Centaur, 1964). Often he gave a symbolic dimension to these compositions, creating works that functioned on the lines of personal surrealistic perception. Many of these found buyers in New York in 1965, during his exhibition at Gallery 55.

The changes that supervened with his installation in Sweden, organized under the light of his new visual reality, were - apart from his unique drawing skill - to appear clearly in his inventive and complex iconographic ability. These find their optimum application, as we have said, in his engravings. Lithographs and copper-plates, washed with water colors, become an arena of complex and finely drawn intermixtures, with protagonists drawn from the animal world, from toys in action, from - in a similar setting - figures of people who to the artist's eye resemble in character or in appearance some animal, bird or insect.

With this diverse and disparate tissue of types, through adroit changes of position and size, well-weighed with consummate skill and mathematical precision, everything appears to be at once motionless and moving, caught up in the whirl of an endless happy adventure. They radiate a sense that they could at any time change roles, suffused with sentiments of profound joy, their diabolical disposition to reverse their appointed destiny yielding with a start to the vision of a world with a new dynamic.

However, beneath this invention of a microcosm of such innocence, lightsome and seemingly weightless, so enchanting in its buoyancy that it is mistaken for reality in the shape of a strange dream, Krallis persuades us that he is not only an artist with an unusually enigmatic sense of humor but also an indefatigable practician of ambiguous metaphorical correlation. The easy access to his work yielded by his visual playfulness, however, is only superficial. Under closer observation, a very particular, complex and codified dialogue unfolds to intellectual exploration. And he provides the motives for this dialogue in his own unique fashion, inventing with the cunning of a small child pleasant allegorical scenes that lead the spectator into an exciting game of exploration in search of interpretations. From these we can see how in the hands of a conscious artist artist's materials can become tools that lead us from childlike wonder to everyday life in all its ordinariness, in the absurdity present everywhere whenever things threaten to go wrong, if the forces of equilibrium cease to be. And in Krallis stylistic argument with these essentially linked groups, it is difficult to define the boundaries between the "wonder" that he presents to us with every outward appearance of verisimilitude and reality. For in their description of worlds in "balanced chaos", in the phrase used by art critic Katarina Ostholm, these aggregate worlds with their rhythmic progression within their perspectives are worth a very attentive approach.

The subject matter of these works yielded, after 1982, three-dimensional constructions, his well-known mobiles. Some set on floor stands, mostly for outdoor settings, some designed to be hung from ceilings indoors, these works are an experiment conducted by Krallis in giving dimension to painted form, inserting them into space as plastic volumes. In their making he uses a variety of suitably chosen materials and intense luminous colors, with strong contrasts, or cool neutral shades. In creating them he seeks the sparest of design forms, giving particular importance to proportion in sizes and final result. He selects motifs viable in space, but at the same time functioning as exemplification of the elements of his visual art world.

In his multiple ceiling mobiles, and there are a considerable number of these, he finds the ideal way for them to function in space, each equiponderant but differing in energy in the setting and role in which it is called to participate. Thus the suspended sculpture is by definition autonomous, but is nonetheless dependent on the energy-charged whole, which stands out like the beginning of an order. So that they can be moved by external factors, he uses for the most part light metals, wood and Plexiglas.

For his outdoor sculptures, by contrast, he uses heavier, rustproof metals and enamel. He gives them monumental dimensions with a dynamic development in height and horizontal spread, finding clever solutions enabling them to act in space and on the collective public to whom they are addressed. In these works as in his mobiles the poetic frolicking with the proper dose of humor is only apparently exhaustible. Although they try to trap the eye with their inimitable grace, they engender the conviction that they conceal meanings beyond the image.

Krallis has to date won many tokens of recognition, among these a host of state commissions. Apart from sculptures of his that ornament interiors, parks and public squares, at least six of his designs for engravings have been used in tapestries for interior decoration, including, for example, the New Tokyo General Hospital. Krallis' response to the bidding of the art of this age continues with unsilenced conviction and insistence in his perceptions, complex and enigmatic in their conceptual and visual relations. As I followed his thoughts in an autobiographical confession, the words that have remained with me are those that speak of "the human circus of everyday life" and of "all that commotion [that] creates a scene, a magical image, whose purpose is humor, play, joy, courage for life!"