Painting 2002
gallery 3
ζωγραφική
gallery 3
ζωγραφική
Lina Tsikouta
Art Historian – Curator at the National Gallery
Tonight, for the time being put the entire blame on the perfidious kiss delivered by Nostalgia¹
''Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two. A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric. A canvas is never empty.''
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Between the lines by Kiki Dimoula and the quote from Robert Rauschenberg lies the thread connecting the new works by Marigo Kassi. Another title could have been: “Materiality, Feeling, Nostalgia, Remembrance”. The works the painter is presenting belong to three entities, which are all reciprocally complementary, adding new elements to one another. They all work with more or less the same subject matter and their execution is also similar.
Through her systematic involvement with nature in her previous exhibitions with the rendering of interior spaces, in combination with the human figure we observe a perpetual movement from the abstract to the non-figurative and from the informel to the figurative. A common concern of hers in all these is the texture, the feeling and the materiality of the painting, taken together with the materials she incorporates. Her visual angle consists of the fragmentary, the close-at-hand, and the familiar.
In her new work the subject matter bears the “aroma” of the female “essence”, as it were. We have become accustomed to saving that a woman’s creativity is no different than a man’s. In this case, however, these are the works that speak of the woman, and are most likely directed to women. They are like whispers, light female conversation, confessional, immediate, sincere and soothing. The organization of the compositions is done by layered system of horizontal and vertical axes, which assist the narrative ness, and the presentation of the veiled allusions.
The little skirt and the pumps are painted with dry pastels and pencil on graph paper, while the shadows of the little girls are executed in spray. The metal grater, the large wooden spoon or the little porcelain heads are added to the work’s iconographic repertoire. In the second entity, using wallpaper or handmade as a base, the previous iconographic motifs are arranged in various combinations. Finally, a third entity presents, in a variety of stances, the calves of young women wearing pumps and an endless combination of feet in shoes arranged on various hierarchic levels of the layers of the compositions. The colors employed in these works are at times quite explosive while other times the tints are soft and faint, like a recollection of the objects or conditions that they are depicting.
The works bear within themselves something of the design immediacy of the motifs and the repetitions of everyday objects found in Pop Art. The stamped, printed figures of the little girls, despite their disarming innocence, bring to mind the fingerprints from “Anthropometrics” by Yves Klein, or the “child like figures” by Jean Dubuffet. The narrative layering oven makes references to the mobility of repeated cinematic or televised “snapshots”. The fragmentary nature of the details of the images and their “freezing” is at times reminiscent of the tricks used in advertising spots. In the case of Marigo Kassi, however, this is an eloquent manner of speaking about beauty, but which has no relationship to the commercialized beauty and the way it deals with childhood, innocence, tenderness, the youth, adulthood and eroticism of women, through the fetishistic objects.
A beauty of framing, of material and texture, where the technique of the delicate pastels lends great sweetness to the image (child’s skirt) and the various accessories, (the various colored fabrics, and the gold, black and mauve tinted sequins), which all increase the … desire.
Things touched, aromas and images, which shoot forth from memory in discreet, nostalgia, muted journey through remembrance. But as the artist herself in 1994 on another occasion. “The interior condition and the exterior reference are mutually endured and in the end become identical”.
¹ Kiki Dimoula, “Complicities of a Spring Mood” from the collection “Of a Moment Together”, Ikaros, Athens 1998, Statement by R. Rauschenberg
Translated by Philip Ramp