On the Surface of Light

In the four years that have elapsed since Varvara Liakounakou’s previous exhibition,her familiar little people have been transformed into pictorial beings. There is no longer any reference to external space, any trace of floors, railings, windows, hillslopes or trees. Now the space suffices as painterly void, in which the oils are diluted once again in successive layers. But the smooth parchment papers and the canvases are interested not so much in the thick impasto as in the play of matter on their surface. The figure, single or double, has been schematized in an embrace that no longer needs details of hands or feet, but merely of those tragic smiles that  accompany it self-negatingly, on heads that merge into one, as in Byzantine icons. The figures now seem to be clearer and begin to break their monochromatic isolation. Darkness is no longer used to submerge the figures into it, but in order to enhance them when these will emerge.

Here the subject is pretext. Because the figures arise from the painter’s relation with her materials. Starting point of her works is what her manner of painting itself dictates. Liakounakou’s tightly embracing couples could, in the end, be any form whatsoever, capable of rendering the image of an enclosed figure which has been trapped inside the very matter that gave it birth. The mass of the colors only momentarily settles: in some places sparse and in others impenetrably dense, with distinct echoes of postwar art informel, the oils battle against the figure, which seems to be ensnared in its attempt to come to the surface of matter, like a fossil fighting to preserve its old aspect. The struggle with her materials is the subject of Liakounakou’s painting.

In a quest of this kind the narrow approach of abstraction is unavoidable, but here it proceeds on the path that starts from the creative core of these works. Here matter is not ‘finished’: as in the Renaissance non finito, the figures are shaped through the shape-less, they are formed through the form-less, in order to find completion, shape and beauty through incompleteness – the imperfection of human nature which so preoccupies Liakounakou. She is led to this through her painting medium itself and not through some idea she has imposed post hoc on her images, which is why her painting has the power of its truth.

The couples have succeeded here in uniting their form with their content. But the painter’s incessant endeavour to control the fluid body of her works at the same moment as she avoids it, resisting the behaviour of her materials, is the redline that creates the tension and the internalism of Liakounakou’s painting.

Perhaps the solution lies in the light of the embrace of that body of hers, which she has painted.

Elizabeth Plessa

(Foreword in the catalogue of Varvara Liakounakou's solo exhibition at Art Space 24, Athens, 2012)