George Skotinos lived in Famagusta to the age of 37. He was forced to leave his beloved town and a large part of his body of work in 1974, when the town was occupied by Turkish troops. As a boy in Famagusta, he had witnessed the constant succession of finds brought to light by archaeological excavations in the neighbouring ancient towns of Engomi and Salamis. The enormous cultural wealth hidden in the bowels of the land of Cyprus, from as early as the Stone Age, sustained his work from the very first steps of his career.

The first cycle of Skotinos’ painterly oeuvre, extending from 1965 to 1974, has the general title Lithosevia. Its subject is matter as the agent of culture: through its ability to change and survive in time, matter can transport alive to the present a history that spans millennia. The painting Metabolism, from the group of paintings by the same name that constitutes a part of Lithosevia, was inspired by precisely this continual metabolic change of matter. It aims at the creation of a visual experience of time as it is imprinted on matter, which, constantly changing and reproducing, perpetuates life in different forms each time. It was painted in 1968, one year after Skotinos’ monumental work, The Horses of Engomi (S. Stefanou private collection). The latter was made in 1967, following the discovery by archaeologists in 1966 of a royal tomb in Engomi, a major settlement of the Late Bronze Age. Inside the tomb, together with the illustrious deceased, his chariot and two horses lay buried. Skotinos painted the skeletons of the two horses as he saw them in the grave, in a process of metabolism; that is, when, during the transition from death to life, they took on the form of plants and flowers of the wild nature of the area of Engomi. An account that the two horses were buried alive with their master was particularly moving to the painter, who ‘saw’, in their struggle to escape, humankind’s effort to live free. A part of the skeleton of the Horses of Engomi, as they are known, can be traced in the painting Metabolism.

Using an expressionist, surrealist idiom, Skotinos – who introduced Surrealism to Cyprus – creates, with realistic impressions as his point of departure, symbolic spaces, dream worlds and spheres of insight, thus abolishing the concept of time and space. The painting accommodates abstraction and the element of the baroque, which lends it drama. This dramatic sensation, which is indicative of many of his works, could be linked to the painter’s personal experiences, as well as to those of his homeland. His works have always sprung from his life experiences. With poetic power and creative imagination, he has created symbolic worlds, giving shape to the individual and collective conscience.