The text that Odysseas Elytis (Nobel Prize 1979) dedicates to Yannis Tsarouchis, presented in this very inspired bilingual modern Greek - French book, is of a literary quality that places it far above a simple critical article. Elytis has the gift of transforming everything he touches into poetry, but it is also that the text was written at a privileged moment, during which the two men, reunited in Mytilene, worked together and put much in common. The text is well known in Greece, where it is seen as an unrivaled approach to the work of Tsarouchis. It also appears as a preface in the catalog of the retrospective that the Bénaki Museum devoted to Tsarouchis, in Athens, in 2016. An unparalleled commentary on a pictorial work, the text constitutes at the same time, and above all, a digest of the ideas and intuitions that underlie the work of Elytis, on painting, the nature of art, which defines the artist, the relationship between tradition and modernity, what it is to be Greek. Sixteen pieces were chosen by the pas a counterpoint to the text, to associate closely with the detail that Elytis expresses. They will illustrate with precision the point of the poet; and on the other hand will constitute a corpus of images in which we find the diversity of style that characterises the production of Tsarouchis. These drawings and paintings are reproduced with the kind permission of the Tsarouchis Foundation in Athens, which holds the rights to all of his work.