19/9/2023

Without Which, Not / Sine Qua Non

Maria Stamati in her new series of artworks is using as threshold the “expressive” painting and speech, develops them in space, composing installations that create existential palimpsests. With the intention not to expand in the space and conquer it, but to invite the viewer to enter into the core of her work, in a twofold relationship of communication, which includes and is included, in a deeply human-existential path of stratifications, concepts, materials and symbolisms that unfolds and alternates through visual art and poetry-speech. The manner that the artist handles and processes her expressive media and concepts, creates a familiarity for the viewer, since the main element that preoccupies Stamati throughout her work and career is to pose questions and concerns, repositioning and redefining the boundaries...

Hence her work refers to visual poetry, as a stitching and function of two different worlds, two expressive means such as visual art and speech-poetry.

Through a new path of synthesis and re-composition, construction and reconstruction, where memory is transformed into ars memoriae, through voice and silence, pause and semicolon, the husking and the dockings, with the confluence of two contrasting traditional materials, one soft and one hard, a "high" and a "low", such as thread and building mesh, she creates a "weft" of sequences, thoughts, symbolisms and emotions.

Maria Stamati re-conceptualizes and re-synthesizes a narrative that is both personal and collective. Personal trauma is denatured through conceptual art and discourse, with its conceptualization from the fragility and the unparalleled strength that characterizes it.

That is why her own images do not contain anything from the recurrence of the imagerative quotation, they are reductionistic but not abstract. The viewer, without realizing it, follows a path through his own associations, but infiltrating the essence of her thoughts and reflections, where gathering, coexistence and even perfect match are included as a natural consequence...

Efi Michalarou
Art Critic & Exhibition Curator
Member of International Association for Art Critics -Greek Section (AICA Hellas)

With Multifaceted Shading

M.S.'s poetry is a poetry of space and time - especially of space, as confirmed by the visual investment of the collection (since painting is the predominant art of space, based on shape and perspective).

In terms of the theme of space, then, the collection moves between individual/domestic space (e.g. poems 2, 3, 4, 14, 23, 26, 28, 36) and collective/urban space (e.g. poems 6, 24, 31). Even the dimension of time is often given in spatial terms (e.g. The 'quickness' of modern life as a suffocatingly tree-lined space: poem 16). Thus poem 39, which introduces itself to us as the central poem of the collection (since it borrows its second stanza as its title), speaks of 'the spatiality of our day'. In any case, the reader quickly realizes that the space described (and painted) is nothing but the inner, psychic world - individual and collective by analogy. This is sometimes done by pointing (e.g. 'In the space of our isolation', poem 29) and sometimes by implication, as it is emblematically the case in poem 24, where we now understand that the 'Cities' are human relationships. And in this way the reader is 'forced' to go back and re-read poem 6 in the light of this new vocabulary.

And so we come to the second key element of the collection, the unity - unity between each poem and the painting on the facing page, and (sometimes) between different poems. The poem-picture relevance is sometimes explicit, given in a style of abstract realism (e.g. 2, 5, 20, 21, 22, 24, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35) and sometimes implied (e.g. is the floating boat in the image of poem 33 the boat of Art? And what is its relationship to the sinking ship in the image of poem 39?) The best moments of the poetry collection, however, are found in the section between the poems. The poet introduces this motif in an understandable way in poems 2 and 3 (an understandable way, firstly because they are consecutive poems and secondly because poem 3 is untitled, so we are legitimately reading it as a continuation of 2), where the interstices described in poem 3 are the 'negative' (and in visual terms) of the house without an interior in poem 2. We also observe a dialectical unity between poems 5 and 8: the 'explanation' given in poem 5 is the earliest justification for the claim in poem 8 that 'there is nothing deceptive or allusive'. The most successful expression of dialectical unity is found between poems 12 and 15. The 'first verb' of poem 15 (v. 2) is none other than the 'I live' of poem 12 (v. 1), which is entitled Any verb. And the 'Second' verb of poem 15 (v. 4) is nothing but the ‘you live' of poem 12 (v. 2). This correlation is supported by the rendering to 'you live' / 'second verb' of the cognate words ‘made of light' / ‘is lighting' respectively in the two poems. Therefore, in the light of poem 12, the meaning of poem 15 is as following: when we disregard ‘I live' (i.e. when we let go of our egoism), then ‘you live' (i.e. concern for our fellow man) will bring to light like-mindedness and understanding.

Among the intertextual relationships and references, three poets are holding a place of honour: Karyotakis (e.g. '-we live, like notes on a wet score', poem 12 ≈ 'We are some rickety guitars'; 'what we set aside graph on our ceiling', poem 28 ≈ March mournful and vertical), Shachtouris (poem 24 ≈ The Gifts, which may be the reason for the emphasis on the colour red in poems 30 and 42), and Cavafy with regard to the symbolic load of individual words, such as the words 'the city' or 'the windows' (poems 24, 35).

Dimitris Kanellakis
Ph. D. in Classics,
University of Oxford.

End of Thread, End of Meaning

Maria Stamati's new artistic proposal, “end of meaning", emerged from her need to express thoughts, perceptions and views of life in visual terms. Her inner concerns are visually shaped, acquire colour, shape, volume, material substance and create poetic images. Her inexhaustible perseverance in constant visual experimentation combined with her source of artistic eagerness shapes her work, giving it a distinct aesthetic value and a peculiar and completely personal idiom. A decisive role in the aesthetics and morphology of her works is played by the bold use of various and multiple materials with the emphatic projection of their materials and textures, as well as the wise exploitation of the geometric dynamics of shapes and the ergonomic relationship between them. The skillful use of the colour palette is also very important in her works, with sometimes allusive and sometimes exuberant colour interventions on the absolute void of the white canvas or the metallic surface, depending on the expressive needs and meaningful determinations.

In the first section, "poetic collection", Maria Stamati's main medium of expression is mainly the embroidery stitch. The thread stitch, an arduous creative experiential process, is used here as a writing and enables the artist to use all her mental and physical powers and potential. The manual work with the constant movements of the needle with the thread - from the piercing of the canvas, the penetration of the thread into the unseen surface, the temporary visual absence of the thread, the stretching, the reinsertion of the thread - this repetitive and completely controlled movement defines the whole style of the work. With the stretched threads, Stamati delimits the canvas, separates it, unites it, shapes it, gives it measure and rhythm, and proceeds... "wherever the edge takes it". The visual artist with the thread imagines, projects, projects, captures, records, proposes, cauterizes and signifies pictorially her poetic discourse. Multiple symbolisms are hidden in the verses and in the objects depicted, while the encapsulation of word and image within a context interconnects thought and depiction.

In the second section, "Hymn to Life", Stamati presents entire prominent universes within larger site-specific sets. In a strong neo-expressionist mood, cubes full of threads are disintegrated, losing their appearance and shape, but gaining a new form and a new life. The artist transports us to a new visual experience by variously revitalizing the abundance of materials, giving them mobility and imbuing them with an abundance of the primary colours of yellow, blue, red and white. The encapsulated primary material is disassembled, released, flowing freely, emitting its aura and celebrating life with a manifest life-giving intensity.

In the third section, "stories without narrative", the artist tells familiar and unfamiliar human stories by embroidering them on canvas. Her narratives fuse diversity, otherness, historicity of time and other thoughts. Here Maria Stamati also gives new expressive extensions with the systematic use of various objet trouvé, which are mainly used as explanatory elements in her embroidered archetypal drawings. Once again she creates methodically, tirelessly, endlessly searching for the end of the thread- meaning of life. Her stitches, out of an inner necessity, illustrate multiple conceptual references in a strict geometric formulation: "the vertical lines are communication tunnels, while the black line symbolizes movement, the path... the bright colors represent hope and all the compositions impose reflections and establish channels of communication and dialogue with the viewer”.

In the fourth section, the artist surprises with the large-scale installation “biographical weaving", which also imposes an experiential relationship with the viewer. Her descriptive choices require a larger space, because the change of dimensions enables her to project the theatricality of her composition in a scenographic way. The juxtapositions of shapes and volumes are obvious: from the sturdy metal structure of four meters long and two and a half meters high to the vast surfaces with flowing free-flowing meanings of life waiting to be woven. In the middle, the pending cubes (40 x 40 cm) float high and sway slowly, rhythmically and, having already been woven, outline the course of a whole life. Each cube consists of six works because on each side of each cube a different work tells individual stories about the important and the unimportant things in life, the interdependencies of people, the coexistences, the interactions, the experiences, the experiences and countless other associations. Ultimately, in the 5 cubes and in the total of 30 works, long life journeys in different times are recounted, until time is lost, neutralized and we are transported into a timeless historiography.

Maria Stamati's conceptual works, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, are characterized by a sensual minimalism with strict geometric forms. She crafts organized and structured with the energetic gesture of the embroidery technique dominant geometric motifs as archetypal ideograms and in combination with other media and techniques she conceptually records the diversity and multicolour of the human world and the labyrinthine paths of life. The artist at the "end of meaning" defines her artistic identity by using multiple expressive and technical means, juxtapositions of materials, juxtapositions of volumes, the coexistence of word and image, as long as her thematic choices make sense of her existential reflections and personal statements, because after all, "the artist must deposit his thoughts". Maria Stamati's visual writing, product of inspiration, original and charismatic, never loses the obvious dynamism that it emits, nor the poetic dimension and the narrative eloquence of the conceptual references.

Louisa Karapidaki MA II
Art Historian

With Multifaceted Shading

The charismatic Maria Stamati in her journey with values, is fully recognized in all forms of arts. She becomes a contributor to the famous "imaginary institution of society" as a producer of her own thought, of various currents, a reference point and who knows how many more! With inexhaustible vitality, warmth, energy she "stands, listens attentively and responds with knowledge and instinct”.

Direct speech. Synthesized by the author who gave the title with multi-faceted shading inscribed and assembled by extended writing in three words: "imagination, creation, autonomy". All this, gives a complete picture of the human thinker, as on the one hand she captures all the various aspects of her thought and on the other hand she records difficult concepts in simple and understandable words, with language changes and pages of content. It is a narrative, as it springs from the space-time of ancient tragedy...

...is this not where the arts and civilization were born?

A sign, a libation. It is the central figure of the book led by the protagonists, writer, poet, visual artist who approach the station of the distant tour. The visual wanderings on the pages of the book do not accompany the poetry-writing but coexist dynamically. Leading thinkers will acknowledge and affirm what a unique pen she is and that she has not yet said it all...

The sequel follows...

Dimitris-Ubertos Filandrianos
Academic
Dr. of Higher Design Education

With Multifaceted Shading

'' Blind
in the chambers to let the light in
because the walls
are not white '' —Maria Stamati

In this poem by Maria Stamatis, the quintessence of the entire poetry collection is succinctly captured because it can be synonymously reached in everything the poet wants to say and communicate. As an integral part of an experienced place, the walls cannot be whitewashed and the experienced place cannot be untouched, unblemished or even immaculate. It doesn’t matter, whether the walls are beautifully painted and elaborately decorated or cracked and plastered. In any case, they are part of the space we move through, in which we live our life, inevitably in all its manifestations.

These manifestations run through the "multifaceted" themes of the collection. The poetic voice begins a personal and collective introspection by penetrating into subjects both well and badly textual and established. The reflections are mainly concerned with attitudes and ways of living and thinking; attitudes that have founded a reality, or at least a particular narrative of it. It is the quality of these foundations that concerns Maria Stamati. She radiographs human relationships and their degree of clarity, she searches for freedom or liberation, she identifies and, in a gentle but penetrating tone, she denounces habit, alienation, uselessness, boredom, emptiness, without, however, ever forgetting the reference to optimism, authenticity, hope.

Key to reading the collection is the lack of passivity in even the sharpest poems, those that at first reading might be described as pessimistic. No matter how much some form of quagmire is confessed in the poem, the speaking person is never left idle at the mercy of circumstances. The poems, often essayistic in character, manage to calmly arrive at the realization of aspects of reality that are difficult to detect and even more difficult, perhaps even painful, to confess. The absence of lyricism signals that what threatens one's happiness, though painful, is dealt with soberly and often with subtle but caustic irony, while the staccato style leaves no room for sentimentality. Every realization in no way implies in Maria Stamati's poetry resignation or defeatism. On the contrary, though harsh, open and unpretentious expression seems to be the most important and courageous demand. It demands clarity and clarity of vision, it demands that man sees reality "unblinkingly", without excuses and evasions because, otherwise, "what is set aside" becomes "a graph on the ceiling" of his.

The awareness of reality, however, does not become a sterile acceptance in Maria Stamati's poems. Awareness of situations becomes a first form of redemption from the shackles of ignorance. The poetic voice declares that the exit from the vortex cannot be found while we are "whirling" in its "distortion". Yet here, the vortex has been identified, it has been studied, its nature and speed are known, therefore the exit from it becomes more likely. The confession of wrongs makes effort a conscious rather than merely a deferred possibility, excuse a rash version rather than a panacea, hope a goal rather than a pipe dream.

In a collection that once again intertwines the poetic with her visual identity, this time in an unbroken unity, Maria Stamati offers the reader material that raises reflections necessary for his inner balance and, by extension, for his balance with the surrounding world. Without being afraid of words and the conceptual load they carry, Maria Stamati gives us a dynamic collection that looks reality in the face, renounces excuses and sets out the reasons why it is worthwhile to "compose the language of effort"; the effort to paint our walls in the best possible way, as we want and seek to do.

Nicoletta Kokosiouli
Classical Philologist
University of Oxford Postgraduate

With Multifaceted Shading

18-1-18

What do Tuesdays advance on Mondays? ...
Maria Stamati is asking.

• At first glance, seemingly, the without tone... or "thirds" as a toll... perhaps an unknown eighth day!
• What does poetry (as a literary genre) advance in painting?
• The pretenses without tones... the colors... the speculations. But poetry as a transcending concept-state emerges from all areas of the arts in this case from all the pages, all the quintessence of life, all the experiences that are "doomed" to "fit" in an ultimate habitat, a book... not for the library... but for the countryside... to be left open in the open air, the wind to leaf through the pages... the rain to dissolve the colours... the birds to peck at the letters!!!

Time will melt it!

Panos Charalambous
Visual Artist
Professor, Athens School of Fine Arts

With Multifaceted Shading

'' Words without mirrors
sneak through the days... '' —Maria Stamati (Gentle Hour, 2003)

Reflections, thoughts, statements are conveyed through the graphs and poetic speech of Maria Stamati in a confessional and revealing work. Meaningful statements with purity of speech flow through her seductive writing "...and the words are veins, blood flows through them", wrote Yannis Ritsos, but also the visual language complements the transfer of meanings and opens dialogues with the power of the image.

With her obvious spontaneity in her sketches, Maria Stamati creates a visual world that reveals a deep inwardness. Her narrative eloquence is evident, despite the minimalist appearance of the works and the sparing use of colours.

In the colour palette she incorporates, among others, white on an earthy dark background, rendering strong contrasts and sometimes creating the illusion of a three-dimensional surface.

Her -predominantly aniconic- pictorial choices narrate personal concerns, inner reflections and confess the unspoken things of life, leaving complete freedom to the viewer to interpret them in his or her own way. Her gestural brushstrokes shape entire universes and emit a special dynamism.

Volumes, geometric shapes, elaborate formations and combinations, deformations, intense mobility, all contribute to her characteristically intense expressiveness. The generally rhythmic pulse of the painted surfaces and the sensitivity expressed in her compositions are not lacking in descriptive sharpness and noticeable pictorial concerns.

Associations and conceptual references through poetic phrases and dynamic images of unrealistic representation in illusory spaces are the driving force of this multifaceted artist, who invites us on a peculiar journey of discourse and visual communication.

Louiza Karapidaki
MA II - Art Historian

All That Remains

Image & Word

June 2004

'' All that remains of poetry,
all that remains of art
on the person who has
seen and heard its words. '' —Maria Stamati

Maria Stamati's painting was, at first,"cosmogenic" for creating her own small world. In the beginning, her visual field was informel in a specific image, but it contained energy and element that were to emerge from the color mass and to form protagonist figures that follow the continuation of her work. In a transitional stage, both elements coexist, both the shaped figure and the unformed field from which it came, indicative of a generative relationship between them.

Thus the human species emerges through a kind of work - palette - by choosing the colors of its face & the individual characteristics of its personality. The painter is there, behind, an indisputable witness of a painful, as well as an hedonic process. Thus "the hours that contain the figure flow in the house of the dream.”

And the hours we had for acquaintance, they passed by in the workshop with much intimacy, as if they were familiar from the ancient times, when word and image were one. Maria knows this well and her works remind this, writing in their background texts - images, while the images also produce text.

As exhibited in the gallery AENAON I, Maria Stamati's works are a summary and the evolutionary stage in a course, with dynamic and research consistency. From a biomorphic starting point, colorful and explosive, the transition is ascertained, passing through intermediate stages, to a colorless, white-black formulation, elliptical but not at all deficient; this transition seems to symbolically declare its existential and artistic agony in the modern social political context. At the same time, a reduction from the specialist to the general, from the subjective to the objective is certified. The characters of her works are mainly her friends and relatives with their individual characteristics, who are traced to emblematic personalities, particularly expressive of a complex current problematic.

While waiting behind their own need to express themselves, our multifaceted mind distorts the beauteous shapes of the figures and it interrogates them endlessly in its desire to extract hidden secrets and confessions. For art and life.

After all, the construction of art is currently much more under the power of facts than beliefs, which are transferred to the painting surface in a way that suggests or recognizes their similarity or reference to specific sources or wounds of history. They are the ones who lend the red bloody passage, which catalyzes the complacency of the black and white image. They are the ones who make the faces wax masks, pale figures with a charcoal outline and the eyes empty from the past, looking astonished in front of the void. Like from another river side.

However, the lines remain active and the contours open or fluid, as the case may be beyond the dream. "This beyond the dream that achieves a purification similar to washing, but completely different." Their purity is realized in a white unnatural color beyond the everyday world; this is the reason why it can bring what is left of poetry, what is left of art.

Dr. Vivi Vassilopoulou

In the Middle of Night,
In the Middle of Day

There is a space-time between the lens and the screen, which is not defined and measured by known conventional means. A sudden and completely unexpected -out of the blue- shadow appearance of a passing figure activates the fluids of the space between the lens and the surface that is the recipient and sender of this image. The image, which in the play of quantities and qualities of light, passes uninvited in the space produced by the video lens and remains awkward and annoying or it escapes automatically as soon as it realizes the mistake. In any case, this adventure has left an incredible energy that pushes the artist, before she has time to complete her premeditated action: to penetrate mentally into the gap of the intermediate space. The artist, photographer or film-maker, whose result of the energy is not simply capturing reality, as many believe, but their will and determination to capture the absolutely specific and unique version of the infinite world they are confronting with their photographic lens.

Several years ago, Maria Stamati dealt with the art of video in the field of research and creation, without forgetting her role as painter. After a highly successful appearance at the international exhibition Artbygeneve, she came back to painting looking for this intermediate space that is more or less a theater of existing or non-existing shadows. In this exhibition, she presents photographs and a video without faces, and she is trying to feel in the blurred field between the lens and the screen: an empty theater space between the true and the false, the present and the distant, in zero which is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end and in the infinite field of dialogue and meditation. While the bodies in the video were real, the faces in her latest conceptual exhibition are utterly products of imagination. The painter is obviously facing the question: immobile recipient - spectator and mobile image or immobile image and mobile spectator? A connotative speech that does not suggest, it does not interpret, it has only meaning and it is looking for answers, like any true artwork.

Aristidis Yiayiannos
Author
Gallery owner

Complex, Adjacent, Unique

Untold is the poetry of the that Maria Stamati reveals, utilizes, exhausts to the superlative degree in the optical-video/photo-but also in the visual material, which is inexhaustibly presented in her current exhibition.

In the video, the visual material is orchestrated by extremely creative alternations and the main stimulus: the hand movements but also the movement of the male and female torso, as it is becoming free of garments; garments of "any" form, substance, quality and texture (shirt, blouse, undershirt, t-shirt, etc.) that cover the female sternum or the male chest.

By deliberately excluding the face, the exceptional sensitivity of the creator to her stimulus reveals the psyche of every person, exclusively through the hand and body movements and at the same time, she orchestrates not just simple information or messages but inexhaustible, in ballast, associations. The rhythm is the main protagonist of this orchestration, the rhythm with which she presents her stimulus not simply in order to create epidermal impressions but this rhythm is, in fact, experienced as an aesthetically complete action. Thanks to the truly denaturing gesture of the creator, the human body is sender and receiver of experiences, lifestyles, mental reactions, biological rhythms, social commands: free from any meaningless, superficial treatment. It projects a field of polling-mapping of life itself in its poetic, dual creative dimension: the result of a complete aesthetic action and not of a demonstration of skill.

The removal or dismissal of any garment that covers the male chest or the female sternum, through the hand movements and the finger contractions, the rhythm and the tension that are manifested in the unbuttoning of a shirt, in the removal of a bra, in the lowering of a zipper, viewing the female underwear or the hair growth on a male chest: they exceed without undoing the anatomical part and make it a key substitute of the missing face: declarative on of the psyche, the physiology, sociability and biological rhythm of each person. A projected substitute, through the inexhaustible range of stimuli, the rhythm and the energy: the amazing creator has not only immortalized them, but she has also felt, experienced and reshaped them, during an exhausting preparation. During the preparation, the passion - given to her stimulus - neutralizes every element that is reactive to the essential poetry of the artistic action, making even the slightest gesture or movement an integral protagonist of the visual event.

The rhythm is the main regulator here: the rhythm not only of the movements depicted but also of the intensity with which the artist herself alternates them in dynamism and direction, reveals a reactive route, in each repetition and inexhaustible in inventive solutions and in intensities. Thanks to Stamati's talent, this path restores the main medium that she used to express herself - the video - as a creation project and not as a glaring demonstration of skill.

By freeing all depiction from any small, narrative and breathless, realistic element, Stamati's ingenious utilization of her stimulus makes her an integral connecting link of a peculiar < map >, thanks to the contained energy and intensity. This map refers to the aura that is surrounding each form. The creator has managed to locate this aura into the rhythm and the intensity that she is using to visually reshape the forms; this leads to the point where the attempted decryption is a constant reconstruction of stimuli. A reconstruction in a constant alternation of intensity, rhythm, movement, aesthetic approach, conceptual submission of emotions, and situations, in an absolute identification with the very energy of life.

Dora Iliopoulou-Rogan
Dr. Art Historian
Technocritic

Here in the South...

''A well-knit tie is the first serious step
in a person's life'' —Oscar Wilde

A tie is a piece of "fragile" silk cloth, that is not enough to cover or protect the naked chest. In this piece of clothing, meanings, symbolism and values of such quantity and size are concentrated in an almost magical way. Being perhaps the most unnecessary accessory of -not only - men’s clothing, the tie was transformed into a global symbol of power, strength, domination and sexuality. Regardless of the different trends, its symbolic value was shaped despite its practicality: From an military uniform accessory of the Croatian mercenaries of the 17th century and the Order of the Royal Cravates, to a gentleman's and successful businessman's integral accessory - the tie has evolved over time into a kind of award, a distinctive that one can wear on one's own.

''If someone steps on your tie, it's your fault,
because it's you who knelt down'' —Karl Lagerfeld

At first glance, one gets the impression that Maria Stamati has a 180 degrees turn with her new job, compared to her two previous presentations. Indeed, the "Complex, Adjacent, Unique" and "In the middle of night, in the middle of day" exhibitions were an introspection, a look and an inward exploration, the illustration, in essence, of an imaginary reality. This time, the artist stands clearly in front of the world and comments the real reality, our daily life in Greece of the crisis, the fate of Europe, the political scene with humor, with sarcasm and above all with elegance. The tie has replaced the white canvas. However, the use of the tie is not exhausted by simply framing the political comment of the artist. Maria Stamati exploits the symbolically charged nature of the object and she uses it accordingly. The tie acts as a necktie; in other works, as a leash: a persistent reminder that the system holds whoever wears it from the neck. A leash that in several works becomes a loop: from a control instrument, a deadly weapon. In other works, she seems to embrace the theme with tenderness, underlining its primary function: a farewell gift from the soldiers' women, as the latter left to go to war, a symbol of mutual faith that all difficulties and dangers will be overcome.

''The sad tie you wear and it adorns you, civilized,
take it off, if you want to breathe'' —Guillaume Apollinaire

A second reading of Stamati's work lets us see behind the obvious political comment (and at the same time unprecedented, in terms of the clear poetic tone of her previous exhibitions). The artist suggests. A common denominator of all works is an implicit fragile balance: The tie closes the area of emotion. It's a well-secured personality lock, one might say. The tying of the knot, in all its 85 variants, is a logical and calculated process, an indication of moderation, limit and discipline that guards it. Removing the tie equals to accessing the content. The proposed solution is revealed as a hint behind the use of the tie, as well as the connection with the artist's previous work: the change, the overthrow, the healing, the improvement starts from inside. The first step is done internally, on a personal level. It is, where "the development of doubt in front of a forest of the established" is born.

Daphni Yiayiannou

12 Women by Maria Stamati

Thematic and semantic counterbalance of her painting, Maria Stamati's poetry refers to her painting without being subservient to it; primary and autonomous word, it simultaneously memorializes the visual gesture with a sense of thoughtful and contemplative, floating from the molecular elements of existence to the infinite magnitudes of the Whole.

It is neither a cerebral contemplation that accumulates in itself, nor a lyrical diffusion, but an inwardness that, cleansed of illusions and naked, is detached from its silent depths to become consciousness, and to be thrown, alone and bound, into the «universe of winds» - in the harsh dialectic of the world. And in the seismic upheavals of life, transient but also suffering, she struggles to determine her own stigma and to grasp the meaning of her own adventure.

According to the definition of the school of Andre Martine, French linguist, if poetry is the surprise caused by the coupling of mutually contradictory or incompatible words, then Maria Stamati's poetry largely corresponds to this: her words invade unexpected, precipitous and following abrupt correlations and they establish an opposite relationship - an element generating paradoxical meaning but not a paradox. It is because, similar to the poetic system of the last two decades' poets, her poetic system runs the risk of being dragged into solutions of convenience, trapping clever ingenuity, imaginative imagery, words juggling and pirouettes; in other words, in a purely formalistic game, which forms glossy surfaces with a thin testimony of truth uniquely and irreplaceably personal.

This risk is very substantially avoided here. A sharp, short style, with words that sometimes fall like rosary beads, they sometimes come down like guillotine blades and they sometimes drip like raindrops; often without a connection and spoken out, with the sentence welcoming the next movement and giving retrospectively its meaning; with memories of once Calvian sounds and lessons from the surreal expressive: the whole result shows that the game is more than a game, that it is not done in the purely formalistic field; the contact of words creates sparks that are intertwined with meanings, which peel the dramatic nuclei from their external elements - the evocative atmosphere is not a decor and an end in itself.

Poetry is not chemistry; it is rather alchemy, where the logical outlines are shattered by the eternal search for the philosophical stone and the Grail. In Maria Stamati’s' poetry, each thematic unit has its secret gallery to the secret depth of the cave, from where, lively and threatening, the breath of the incarnates emanates.

Giannis Kalioris
Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the
8^th University (formerly Vincennes) - Paris

Silence Passing By

'' Art is a process
beyond the limits of the mind ''

This phrase is contained on the last page of a poetry collection by Maria Stamatis. This unknown and sibylline "process" is a mixture of bold imagination and subtle metaphysics.

It is a fiery liquid metal that has passed through the blast furnace of human emotions. It could be the forefront in M.S.'s poetry.

Michael D. Stasinopoulos
Academician
former President of the Hellenic Republic