2005 ANNY BALTISSERA ROMA

“Spirituality in primogenial formulations”

Maria Kombatsiari’s poetics lives through the play of strong lights, fragmentation of space, and strongly marked scansions of colour, in accordance with a precise aesthetic sensibility, which escape mere academicisms or simple stylistic remakings.

Conceptually speaking, the artist elaborates a formal syntax, which is articulated in free figurations such as texture with contrast, volutes which slip away from the background, and decompositions of surfaces with expressive variants.

Such figures are all filtered by an original cultural structure on which Maria Kombatsiari determines and formalizes into a language of extreme originality, thanks to her essentially schematised and minimalistically expressed graphitisms.

It is precisely in the continuous research that the painter recounts her profound lyric creativity, or rather in the sequential process of her various elaborations that the most complete and profound sense of her way of painting can be found.

Maria Kombatsiari’s intuition on researching a variety of graphic essentialities unavpoidably brings the observer to spot the deepest recesses of her spirituality, in these primogenial formulations, in their most elementary and abstract structure. In fact, the painter’s language is characterised precisely by the primordial vitality of the figurations which stand out for their pure form, which enables the observer to be evoked sensations of freedom and strength.

Letters and lines, notes and rectangles are spread around on her canvas in an only apparently casual order, because the painter intends to create the illusion of a real space as an expressive mirror of her interior reality.
Lines, geometric lines, define chromatically different sections, evoking the tones of the lights -sometimes intense colour, sometimes not-, which may recall the canons of the abstract expressionism.
From here it comes Maria Kombatsiari’s need of a modern grapho-chromatic narration, an essentialised symbology which reveals a deep spirituality conveyed by the artist into a new language which reaches what in art does not have frontiers.

As a consequence, the observer is given a long theory of paintings offering original intellectually experienced vibrations, which translate into free and antigravitational graphic alternations, ultimately into the life itself of colour.

Within such innovated conceptualizations, Maria Kombatsiari’s interpretation does not risks to lose its philosophical sense, which on the contrary is translated into painting as an expression of profound creative freedom.
In the light of what has been said so far, the sense of Maria Kombatsiari painting is that of a new way of “narrating” colours, spatiality, graphitisms: it is in their alternance, in their overlappings and oppositions that the painter’s creative complexity is to be found. Furtrhermore, in her personal formal approach, the painter goes beyond the boundaries of the sign, develops a new spatial essentiality. The space which is created has a well defined pictorial identity, in which the artist is delighted to express the most profound urgency of a c
reativity-in.progress.

Anny Baldissera
Istorico d’arte-Gallerista Roma 2005