ARTWORK 2018

“In essence, the poet has one theme: his living body”
George Seferis, poet

In Papaioannou’s work, we can distinguish the deconstruction of the bodies and forms: decollage - fragmentation - detachment - intersection - displacement = scarification, movement - time, dissolution, flow and re-synthesis. The visual surface is transformed into a kind of atlas where each snapshot can be read as an independent narrative, while being part of an integrated structure. We are at the perimeter and at the centre at the same time. The contrasting colours, sometimes intense and conflicting, and sometimes soft and pastel, with the dew and freshness of a modern perception in ideas of painting, transmits a musical air that rightfully belongs to the future, since painting is not over and will never end. As D. Dimitriadis says: “Anything that seeks its end can only find it where it is lost. In its beginning.”

Man’s inability to find identity in his primitive states drives the resulting impotence to discover truths within hidden meanings. And so a shattered cosmic collage emerges where the human existence plays in the deconstructed form of fractured bodies, in which tragically, the inability to discover the coexisting bodies of his deep primal soul and present emerging actuality emerges.

Paradoxically, the captive narratives and the boundless renderings are juxtaposed in an ability to reinforce defined boundaries as well as openness in creative activity, as they grant the ability to create new texts constantly. An inexhaustible wealth of playful scenarios are emergent: the “Object of the Imagination,” the “Unlimited”.

In the end, the work of Christina Papaioannou can be assessed as an active stage where the body and the spirit converge and diverge, the external and internal world, love - loneliness, emphatically emphasising the animosity of life and the poetry of painting, as a cathartic value against this agony.

Curated by Efthimis Lazongas (Sorbonne University –Paris I –Pantheon, History of Art Professor at ASFA, Master’s in Visual Arts).