Maria Yiayiannou on the solo exhibition «End of Thread, end of meaning»

Meanings cubed

For the installation «Hymn to Life 1» by Maria Stamati

June 2017

One way to handle numbers more easily is to round them. One way to handle emotions more painlessly is to square them. We bring our inner anarchy to account, we put up walls for our hidden tornadoes by articulating them, by infusing our chaos into words’ that is, into harder shapes. The meeting of hardness (that is perishable) with softness (that is durable) is one of the philosophical implications of Maria Stamati’s threadlike thematic cycle. The artist’s geometry draws with a delicate material interwoven with feminine craftsmanship. Her spinning meets architecture in compositions that become space themselves.

Maria Stamati’s work is shaped alongside the tireless movement of the hand that defines the concepts of Shape and Colour. She sculpts the concepts – transcribing in space this fundamental pictorial distinction – and brings them into conversation, with the eloquence of the composition delighting the viewer. In this particular work, the viewer curves through the full transparency of a Plexiglas showcase, the six sides of an eccentric cube. Slightly tilted to give the sculpture the minimal but sufficient dynamism of a movement as decisive as the movement of a head inexplicably tilted to contemplate, the white cube reveals its innards. Each of its five sides presents us with a plan view of a type without identity, or rather with an identity open to definition. At the same time, it suggests an existential colorology, as on one side we see the three primary colors (blue-red-yellow) intertwined and on the four surrounding sides we see them analyzed’ three colors might be enough to synthesize and analyze the sunshine of a clear mind.

Parallelograms intersect in a poetic rhyme, repetitive patterns make up nets, a fan and a rose add a touch of romance to this cube that hangs like a pensive piñata. And in there, in the linear shapes, colour as thread. Thread, on the one hand as pattern, creates the geometric floor plan-drawings of invisible cities that we inhabit alone within ourselves-and on the other hand as color celebrates the psychic tone of the composition. The top of the work is its bottom, as a rain of colourful threads of various lengths erupts from the underside of the turning square, revealing yet another dipole posed by the artist( and together the structural coexistence) of the unmanufactured element with the handmade / the finished with the created. At the same time as one enjoys the refined weaving of the motifs that interweave in the place-transfer of a squared head, one is equally delighted with the simple juxtaposition of the colorful threads that like upside-down hair lighten the law of gravity.

Maria Yiayiannou