Giannis Kalioris on the «12 Women» solo exhibition

Giannis Kalioris

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
8th University (formerly Vincennes) – Paris

Giannis Kalioris on the «12 Women» solo exhibitionnikos