He decided to go to Paris upon discovering the works of Picasso and Matisse in the cosmopolitan Egypt of the 1930s, but his plans were postponed for ten years because of the war which he fought with the Hellenic Air Force.
He studied the writings of art historian and theorist Pierre Francastel and joined in 1949-1950 Fernand Léger’s studio,[4] whose classes he paid for working as an interpreter for the American students who benefited from the G.I.
Macris went on to become one of the representatives of the new School of Paris[6] The artist married the Dutch sculptor Pauline Eecen (1925) in 1956 and moved to the Netherlands from 1958 to 1960,[4] where he began a new cycle of study on landscape.
"[8] Macris revealed the full scope of his mastery through large-format works such as Composition in 1955;[9][10] as Roger van Gindertael noted the following year,[11] he was well aware of the stakes involved in plastic art.
What Macris wrote in the exhibition catalogue of 1959, “My starting point is always a source of light which gives me an order ; it is never a precise nor a defined form”[3] remained true for the last twenty years.