Aristodomis Kaldis would be more widely recognized as one of the most original painters of his day, had he been less of a Bohemian and less of a public personality. Instead, he tends to be pigeonholed as a naive painter. However, naive he was certainly not. The true naive is obsessed by the need for finish, to make things look real. If he paints a wall, he will describe each brick. Kaldis, on the other hand, had an unfailing knack for knowing where and when to stop. Like Bonnard, like Kandinsky, he stops painting as soon as he sees what the action of the painting has taught him. He was as much an action painter as the New York abstract expressionists, Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning, who were his friends and colleagues.

Lawrence Campbel