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