I first met Dimitris Laletas in Thessaloniki. June 1990. It started to rain, and we took refuge in a café. Of all the titles of honor one could adorn him with - and there were many - he deserved the title: a child like Christ. He spoke to me about his life in Alexandroupoli - where he was born and raised, and he showed me his treasure chest - his paintings. Strange, Egyptian, like Fayum faces, folk men, full of life and death, wrestlers who lost their morning victories, football players without grammatical knowledge, ready to dance, to cry, to hunger, to die.

Women who never knew the crowns of marriage, before mirrors or doors opened to nowhere. Young girls dressed up for a stroll on the beach. At the Lighthouse of Alexandroupoli, perhaps. I liked the works he showed me and bought them to become his first customer. He talked to me about the workshop he went to in the morning to seek work, in Thessaloniki, and they told him, later, about his need to work...

I had just bought the bookstore at Didotou 39, and I asked him to hold his first painting exhibition here. At the opening of the bookstore. And it happened. However, this left-handed painter worked wonders and began to translate, to find the covers of the books in our publications, to draw for the magazine 'Odos Panos'...

I watched him change, grow, move on to other themes of his art and reach his horses in the night with their riders holding them by the reins. Next to lakes, rivers, capes, and dense forests, he hid the nakedness of bathers who continued their pantheism in nature. Secret conversations. Silences in nowhere. Sweet kisses that were lost in time and now remain calmly taming horses in the night. And they obey their master's love. They look him in the eye and read his secrets.

His solitary women grew up, walked the streets of London, Rome, Madrid - alongside boulevards, in cafes they spread their languor to converse with eroticism. In their eyes, a new light. A flash. Dimitris Laletas departed towards the world of Plato's ideas - which was also his; full of marvelous artistic visions.