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
- Solo Exhibition «All That Remains»
- Texts – Reviews