Greece - Maria Kompatsiari

Using representation as a starting point, the painter has followed a path through personal experimentation and investigation in both color and technique, which have led her to the construction of an abstract visual language.

Her abstract landscapes are processes of the mind and spirit which contain existential situations and escapes, open to variable readings. Her visual language is characterized by a tender yet violent, individual vocabulary. Tender in the way she approaches her theme; violent because of her extreme color contrasts. Through her journeys, adventures of matter and form, and through her personal, persisting process of investigation, the artist aims towards an ultimately soothing visual confession.

In the work created for OPEN 14, the artist invades into outdoor, public space, breaking the confines of her two-dimensional, illusory painting. She does so with the same eloquence, using the main structural components of her visual language: dynamic juxtapositions between the linearity of her drawing and the explosive intensity of color, breads, inversions, traces, scriptures, spreads of rhythm and form, cymose and sinuous arrangements, that she unravels through the illusionary handling of the canvas’ surface. She masterfully transposes this illusory manipulation of space and time into the three dimensions and she invites the spectator to multiple readings.

The cube and its spreads, constructed so that one encloses the other, become symbols – vehicles of spatial perception and experience, incorporating the concepts of removal and travel, bearing the charged symbolism of some random flight, escape or daydream. Through the use of the outer wooden construction/shell, the cube’s basic structure encompasses the boxed paintings within the enclosed shape of a sui generis miniature of an imaginary gallery. It encloses an ironic comment on multiplicity, space, dream, boundary, distance, intimacy, rupture, density, void, silence, stillness, explosion… ultimately on the anesthetized image of space, the point where the conscious meets the vague.

Text by
Maria Kenanidou