Nassos Daphnis, a Greek-American artist who deployed brilliantly colored geometric forms in precise formal relationships to create nervous, dynamic paintings on a heroic scale, died Nov. 23 in Provincetown, Mass. He was 96.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his son, Demetri, said in announcing the death last week.
Daphnis, a florist by early training and a renowned cultivator of hybrid tree peonies, drew on his sensitivity to color and his keen understanding of nature’s geometry to develop a precise, hard-edged painting style that harked back to Mondrian and looked forward to minimalism. Its dynamism depended on the tense juxtapositions of primary colors arranged in rectangles, squares and curved lines to create what he called “vibrations.”
At a time when abstract expressionism placed a premium on psychological intensity and spontaneous mark-making, he coolly arranged color in precise, controlled patterns on the canvas. In his color-plane theory, black commanded a forward position, with blue, red and yellow progressively receding toward white, which represented infinity.
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