1990. Wear - out .The mother of all things. Critics by Haris Kamboyridis .  

Lazaros Maravas expressive aspirations become clear immediately , he wants to talk about the wear of things and forms , about the meaning of revitalization and about lastingness ; he also wants to make a succinct reference to artistic expression .Thus , rusty metal things , worn by wind , earth and damp , become his raw material and the vehicle for this thoughts . This young artist looks at old barrels (old cans old domestic appliances, anything of that ilk) and sees instead the flowers of the earth.

He plucks those blooms with care and then presents them in either their original form or as an extension of their own inner cohesive relationship. The resulting forms are these works, which make up his first one-man show, a modest yet nonetheless dynamic demonstration of his expressiveness. There are also certain indications of those side - roads taken whilst pursuing the course of this development perhaps most distinct of all is a mythological direction, seen in the works where the tangle of forms harks back to notions of lovers embraces and consequently to reproduction; elsewhere the materials he has used have become the tools of assemblage, resulting in compositions in a playful mood, and in yet other works, the visual experiences are depicted on the surface, using more conventional painting means - color and other minor interventions .

Maravas appears to be deeply aware of (and fortunately, unable to escape from) his personal heritage and experiences. He himself is a product, a living example, of the relationship between the soil of Thessaly and the sophisticated way of life in America . He combines a down - to - earth simplicity born of interment understanding with expressive minimalism, and in this way gives us a telling glimpse of the wear - out of things within the ultimate womb - the earth. Many are the times when these corroded metal objects seem as natural as those early products of the healthy products of nature far more closely than the contrivances of a bourgeois sensitivity, which both seeks and finds.

I personally shall wait with interest to see what further natural and technical miracles of earthly re-creation will emerge from his crop. How they will emerge is already clear and conclusive.

1993 . Table football . Critics from Katerina Koskina .

Lazaros Maravas is one of the young artists who already given evidence of a remarkable art idiom. His work < Table Football > that consists of 11 stylized football players, is an environment directly referring to the < table football >> a game particularly popular in the 60s and 70s.

The concept of play, with all its inherent seriousness, makes its presence ever more intensely felt in the field of fine arts. The multiplicity of opinions and freedom characterizing international art since the end of the 80s. < Allow > ever more artists to turn to play , either as memory or as ironical provocation and critic or as research into the first elements of creation , without running the risk of having their work considered naif . From Niki de Saints Phalle and J. Tinguely to Borofsky , D Oppenheim , G .Lappas or T . Pavlopoulos and others, with different associations, experiences and aims , play has been proved to function in a way complementary and not opposite to the world of adult and rational creativity . Besides the term artist-child is not new and may fit more artists than it seems to express at first sight.

In the case of Lazaros Maravas , the table football , as work and game , is the playground of a particular period , inextricably linked with many remote but not forgotten elements . The billiards room was a lumpen - space popular songs by Gavalas and Kourti (Greek song artists) were heard and where the clients, frequently candidates for a real or internal migration, entered with their sports newspaper folded under their arm. Play was not only a amusement, but a battle aiming at showing one s strength or proving his skill. The player represented a team -often his own-and competed with his opponent. This kind of play tends to become extinct now, following the spread or electronic games. But the billiards room, apart from nostalgic, is connected in Greece with an unpleasant period of its recent history

The work is clearly based on a background where play has both a recreation and social dimension. The artist - child is also here the player, an element necessary in the whole construction, since what can or cannot be done.

It is game used by the artist in an effort to search not only the concept of play per se but also its social implications, transformed into a work through the artistic process.

Lazaros Maravas enters through this work in a difficult space, where his morph plastic and ideological search risks competition with the sociological content of his proposals.

It is a difficult, painful, but at the same time very interesting enterprise, fully compatible with the multi - dimensional character of artistic activity.