The story of Mario Prassinos starts casually. He was one of the youngsters who got swept by the tide of surrealism in the mid 1930s. An immigrant from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, he was stranger in a strange land from the get go and so embracing the exploratory, boundary pushing attitude of the surrealists was not really bending over backwards to him. He was already alienated, and his perspective allowed his to go even further than the rest.

However, by the 1930s the surrealist movement was getting old real fast. The group slided towards dogmatism, slowly closing in on itself. Breton and folks grew numb of what was going on around them and indulged in retracing same old tricks over and over again. The group was too big for its own good and basically immobile in terms of further aesthetic development as an artistic unit. But as an idea — surrealism still had the flame going.

Due to his youth and relative inexperience Prassinos was more eager to try something different and make mistakes than his older folks. This made one of the more exciting painter associated with the surrealist movement.

His automatic works are particularly interesting. Prassinos way of going applying the automatism was via casual sketching. This is very different from the traditional free styling “stream of consciousness” approach to the technique, practically the complete opposite of automatism, but the combination brought some unusual results.

Sketch drawing is very similar to automatic drawing conceptually. The difference is that you know what you are sketching (at least in some abstract manner) while you have no idea about the eventual end result while doing the automatic drawing.

What brings sketching and automatic drawing together is that there is no overbearing Damocles Sword weaving over to you to make the things “right”. You just do the thing and the fact of that accomplishment contributes to the bigger cause in the form of the empirical knowledge.

The sketch is nothing more than a stepping stone towards the bigger, “real thing”. It is more of an exploration of possibilities, a study on the ways of doing things, than a fully-fledged and reasoned artistic expression. It is a throwaway, disposable entity of half-measures and wrong moves.

Similarly, automatic drawing is the expression of the spur of the moment, unbound by the constraints of reasonable utilitarianism. It goes somewhere and it comes around the way it is, because it was made in that particular moment. It is a careless document that conceals “the” and exposes “the the”.

Prassinos way of doing automatic drawing is to blast it out in a singular burst. In his automatic drawing he is stomping the road through the thick jungle debris of his mind towards the goal that is ain’t exactly real or it is real but it aint’ exactly there.

His pieces are bombardments of ink on paper made with strategic precision. He exactly knows what he is going to do, the thing is that his intention is not to depict anything specific but to spend that nondescript notion lurking deep inside in a couple of swift moves. In a way, it is a savage offensive on the mind, a routine of recalibrating the sense.

Above anything else, Prassinos is documening the change that occurs within himself while making the pieces. In a way, it is a dance composition between a hand, pen, ink and paper.

The one where the last man standing is the artist who moves on to the other things changed.