Loustas uses bold strokes but soft colors in his New York paintings … His passionate attachment to the city is apparent in every canvas he has done … He has successfully captured the heart of the city in “Childrens’ Zoo”, “The Postman”, “At Broadway” and “Children Around a Tree.

A poet of the brush …

In the paintings you presented there are no ostentatious, contrived and meretricious concoctions which fool the ignorant. This is honourable on your part. With the talent you possess you could go very far as long as you wish it and without fearing hard work. With a lot of love and appreciation, your former professor, Yiannis Moralis.

Not only do we see Florina in the varying seasons but through the veil of the many moods of the artist, for the balance of joy and sorrow in the spirit of Loustas is sensitive and quicksilver. One moment Florina is all colour, movement and happy action and the next empty, drained of colour, a town of melancholy and rain. His quest is for the truly artistic rather than the sensational. The casting of shadows, the catching of reflections, the spreading radiancy of an Autumn day, these more intangible things he has the ability to depict  … His line is quick, deft and assured.

A highly rewarding one-man show … on display at the Galerie Internationale … 42 oils … executed in broad, self-confident strokes of subtle, integrating color.  Many, such as … a superb series “Olympias Halkidiki” are extremely exciting compositions both when viewed as abstract works and as representational, moody paintings.

Kostas Loustas startles us with … a series of paintings which astound us not only by their number (more than eighty portraits of personages and personalities of post-war Thessaloniki) but also for the scope and the nature of his figurative expression. These are works which … attempt to go further and to portray all the dimensions of each subject – professional, social, intellectual, spiritual.’… Loustas gives us an astounding collection, a whole gallery of works which … display the characteristics of a personal expressive idiom.’ … The artist seeks and succeeds to accent the typical without sacrificing the personal, to express what is inside without adhering faithfully to the superficial. The value and the importance of this whole series of portraits … does not lie so much in the subjects portrayed … as in the artist’s endeavour to transmit something of their particular substance, as he understood it, through expressionist values. In other words, he attempts a psychological penetration which translates into optical values and expressive formulations which never leave the spectator indifferent.

With his incisive perception and freshness of sensitivity he offers … works employing his beautifully crafted expressive language, a language without superfluous ornament …Without repressing his own emotion, Loustas records moments from the everyday life of the little girl … endeavouring to convey the full spontaneity of her childlike innocence and the whole range of feelings still free from the rigid patterns of adult intention. In his distinctive, elliptic style, abstracting and abstracted he captures the vital essence of the subject endowing it with his own special values, using his skill to highlight the child’s psychological disposition as she finds her way through the fragile world of the adults around her.

What makes Loustas’ work so spectacular is the way in which he makes full use of his extraordinary skill in handling colours and shapes to portray human emotion.

A painter of supreme talents with a continuously rich artistic production for the past 50 years…instantaneous visual perception of the subject, quickly transferred onto the canvas with expressionistic brushstrokes and colours which are almost violent but also innocent…Loustas is immersed in the landscape, and becomes one with the moisture of Northern Greece which sits heavily on the colours…Already established amongst experts, he can deservedly claim a great deal more in our country’s history of landscape art.

In addition to his academic education, his paintings reveal a deep knowledge of the currents of European art, and what the previous generation of Greek painters learned from them. Loustas experimented with techniques and materials, eventually cultivating a personal idiom of soft expressionism, which culminated in his series of “80+1 Portraits of Thessaloniki Personalities”.

He knows how to transform the day-to-day into something atmospheric, full of poetry and sentiment, forming at the same time a direct bridge of communication with the emotional world of the spectator. His paintings are in absolute harmony with the seemingly simple but literary observation of everyday life, and he lures the spectator-reader into an internal description of his chosen subject matter.