angeliki xynou

«The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me». I hear this phrase by Gaston Bachelard, looking at the work of Angeliki Xynou.

Is it play, poetry, theatre, reality, dream or fairytale?

A gigantic pencil aiming at a little girl: is it its character that will be given shape and form? The dramatis persona that will lead us to the secret spaces of our first house, our first universe?

Sparks of memories as you walk, feeling your way through the darkness? Staircases that are so big that you can only cope with their size by putting your foot on the first step, or that be-come real only because you go up them?

The girl carrying her school bag returns blind-folded to the house with the enormous stair-case.

Standing on a pile of books, the little girl dis-covers a horse inside the wardrobe.

The huge neck of a giraffe prying into the room.

A child-cat appears through the door.

Humans coming into the little houses of objects: hidden people who can fit inside un-locked drawers.

Men and women lying inside a box: box-bed, coffin, psychoanalyst’s couch?

A man with very long arms.

A man with endless legs.

Cats.

Fish, dog, wolf, tortoise. A dwarf. Little Red Riding Hood.

Portraits and people. Family photograph. Moments captured forever.

The theatre...Miss Julie is lying down, like a doll, inside the box, in front of a Jean who is dressed as a pierrot, without livery, and a pair of boots, to the right of «the stage floor». Chambermaids dressed in black with white aprons, as if they have come out of Chechov’s and Strehler´s white Cherry Orchard. Theatre even in the titles (Theatre Director and Company). Playful intertextuality: In the bathroom, a bather reading extracts from the Bible to a clown.

Through the distortion of scale and the use of dialectic contrasts - between real and unexpected, reasonable and unreasonable, art and life, knowledge and innocence, small and big, obvious and hidden - Angeliki paints the unexpected image of a poetic act; she directs theatrical echoes or illustrates her own unwritten fairytale. She skillfully uses a random imprint of her acrylic palette as a guideline and then renders certain figures with very fine strokes and watercolours. The search for form is balanced by the strength of the narration: sharply de-fined characters carrying their long history and internal conflicts, while at the same time, this feeling disappears as they become part of these familiar yet mysterious internal landscapes.

Angeliki is surrendered to the mystery of this strange world, she gives it life and makes it her own: she possesses it and she is possessed by it. And as she looks at theatre through painting and paints as if she was directing a play, she dedicates this exhibition to her «favorite painter, Lefteris Vogiatzis».

 

Dio Kangelari