Efi Michalarou on the solo exhibition «Without Which, Not / Sine Qua Non»

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)