2015-GIANNHS-BOLIS-Idiolects: Script—Gesture—Matter

Idiolects: Script—Gesture—Matter  

Maria Kompatsiari’s work has been consistently marked by an ongoing experimentation with expressive means and media—a work in a constant state of evolution, shaped by a process in which its basic elements are transformed and renewed. Idiolects are a large group of mixed-media compositions in which the amount and vitality of the paint, its density and dilution, the sense of dynamic movement, and the spontaneity of free gesture and script play a major role. Taken together and in the dialectical relationship among the individual works, they form an interesting visual environment and an artistically cohesive idea that is original in terms of both conceptual practice and the construction itself. 

The complete disengagement from any kind of figurative reference enables the artist to explore the purely plastic characteristics of the painting on a fundamental level: its rhythm, structure, texture, the unmediated transmission of emotion. Giving primary weight to the role of color, she fashions a self-referential space that asserts itself with the intensity and surfeit of the almost embossed configurations on the surface of the painting, intimating maze-like paths from light to darkness,  crafting visual episodes,  and revealing images of another, heretofore hidden reality. She succeeds in conveying a mood that is at times dramatic, at times lyrical, but always unique and evocative.   

Explosive contortions of color; paths and graphisms that spread out in all directions, extending through—and on the verge of exceeding—the two dimensions of the work; spiraling, twisted primitive scripts; pulsating shapes that coexist with, confront, overlap and penetrate each other. Gathering energy, they define a terrain of transformation and heighten the impression of automatic recording. 

In this swell of chromatic brilliance and expressionist gesture, within its warm and cool hues, one gradually discerns questions and digressions, instances of ambiguity and inner uneasiness, the stretching of boundaries. Amid sense and sensibility, feeling and intuition, notions of order and chaos, symmetry and asymmetry, the eruption of color and the symbolism of her palette, the artist provokes and proposes each time different readings and narratives, and each time in direct relation to psychic states and behaviors, subjective views and perspectives, stimuli and experiences. In so doing, she defines and shapes her relation to and communication with the world, and her position on—and opposition to—the tragic conditions, impasses and anxieties of a critical era in transition. 

Giannis Bolis, art historian