Summer

First displayed in Moralis’ solo show at the Zoumboulakis Gallery in March 1997, “Summer” could easily be mistaken for a work from the 1970s. As Angelos Delivorrias noted in the exhibition catalog, the thematic core of Moralis’ painting remained “resolutely unmoved.” The Greek summer was a constant presence in his art across decades—celebrating bare bodies unreservedly exposed to the sun, the dazzling reflections of light that give rise to illusions and mirages, erotic encounters, and the poetic essence of the female form, which continually captivated the artist’s gaze.

The painting is composed of just four colors: blue, pale blue, white, and black. These correspond to the sea and sky, the transparency of flesh, and the shifting interplay of day and night, light and shadow. Landscape is not absent here; it is internalized, folded into the bodies with a Cubist sensibility that flattens and deepens space simultaneously. The sensual embrace of forms in Moralis’ work finds a kindred voice in Octavio Paz’s “The Double Flame” (1993), where he writes: “We lose ourselves as persons and recover ourselves as sensations. As sensation becomes more intense, the body we embrace becomes more immense. A sensation of infinity: we lose our body in that body. The carnal embrace is the apogee of the body and the loss of the body.”