IDIOLECTS
For many years now Maria Kompatsiari has dedicated herself to studying and researching artistic creation, around which she is constantly experimenting, in this way broadening and deepening her thoughts as well as the means of expression she chooses to use each time so as to create works that have a certain sensitivity and are complete in terms of meaningful content. Apart from the knowledge she has gained in the process and apart from the numerous trips she has taken from time to time in order to experience – from up close – major artists and artworks, what best defines her are her ever increasing spiritual concerns and her observation of the problems (ideological, social and aesthetic) of our time; a time of contradiction, of disagreements and subversions that demand review, on the one hand in relation to interculturality (which forms a new framework of discussion) and on the other hand in relation to the roles art is called upon to play today, as the language of a complex new condition of communication and consciousness.
This distinctive series of works, having been created using this contemporary artist’s personal idiom of expression and varied materials, has already risen to prominence and has in fact received highly favourable comments from the press. The Museum of Rhodes is to present this particular series anew (complemented and completed with new works), since Maria Kompatsiari has already differentiated, assigned meaning to and processed the entire rationale accordingly, as well as the sensation caused by her works, often replacing the small scale with the large scale of her expressionist gesture and conceptual ‘script’.
In the Idiolects series, the painter and engraver combines both techniques on her surfaces and assigns meaning to them, digging and at the same time rebuilding (where necessary) the artistic scope of her script, an abstract – in terms of signs – ‘script’, which uses intensity and moderation, density and spacing, as well as splashes of colour and stylistic variations of tone to render coarseness and lustre as features that depict the dialectical relationships of depth and surface.
In these works, the constantly alternating and flexible structure of each composition adds meaning (through the qualities of colour) to the design and vice versa, thus forming the plot of a casual narration, where the elements of which it is made up appear in a fluid, dynamic state that denotes the function of light. In these works, the intrinsic and extrinsic light identify with the distances as well as the changes that characterise this vibrant space, at the literal and metaphorical level, seeing as Maria Kompatsiari’s structurally restless and volatile space is associated with the coexistence, the interaction and the ‘ontological’ interrelation of the conscious and subconscious.
The fluidity, internal mobility, varying mutations and continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of form, which in these works transforms into space or takes its place, distinctively depict the gestural process itself as an equivalent constitutive ‘condition’ (to form). This transforming ‘form’, which appears in the visual foreground as an intention, process and result of ‘recording’, seeks (as a seemingly hovering and insolvable riddle) its special significance in terms of time and space, as well as its increasingly notional identities, while also adopting their continuous negations. In these Idiolects the past is intertwined with the present, as are the memory’s senses with the phenomenology of impressions, as the interventional and intermittent ‘discourse’ falls upon the unexpected silence of a ‘language’ defined by oscillations, rhythmic formations, internal conflicting elements, paradoxical harmonisations and contradictions, which attractively and imposingly reveal – like a whisper – the potential of a new morphogenesis. This morphogenesis prompts – as an open proposal – its new meanings along with their perpetually surfacing doubts.
Athena Schina
Critic & Historian of Art
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