On the Surface of Darkness

Dark, blacks and blues, and lighter, earthly browns and ochres, the essentially monochromatic works by Varvara Liakounakou depict exclusively the human figure, its relation to space and its relation to other human figures. Beings are lost inside the background only to be revealed by our eyes, like the figures we used to discover as children in marbles, in worn wooden surfaces and old walls.

She works on thick layers of oil paint, but, in the end, prefers to fight her material, almost to deny its nature and its properties. She dilutes the oil and spreads it like the watercolour and ink she loves, but the oil paint, in turn, fights her back, drowning her figures in it. And then she struggles, as if trying each time, on the edge of things, to rescue them from disappearing, to draw them up, as if from the depths of a murky lake. In her painting darkness is used to trap figures inside it, to make them distant reminiscences of what they once were.

With memories in Romanticism, Symbolism, Goya’s black works, Whistler’s nocturnal landscapes and his longilinear full-length portraits, Art Informel, Bouzianis’ women and Morandi’s still lives, Liakounakou’s human figure is schematized and minimized to the bare necessities: head, torso, feet.

Curved and leaning inwards to its own body, this figure seems to be facing the world with stoicism, as if through a net. Usually without clear indications of its sex, it smiles indefinitely but undoubtedly, with a smile sometimes enigmatic and sometimes tragic, as if it possesses the knowledge of a great secret. It embraces other human figures, without the use of hands, in a primordial contact. Usually, the figure stands lonely in the midst of the painterly void, interrupted some rare times by minimal traces of interior or exterior spaces: the outline of a chair, the structure of a window, the shape of a house and, most often of all, the form of an archetypal tree that has the same bare simplicity and nobleness of the human figures, friend in a rather hostile world where the floor of the house is leaning dangerously forward, the slope of the mountain is too steep, and the land empty and unknown. Reality does not seem a safe place for these little beings.

Liakounakou protects them with tenderness and compassion in the strangely strong and silent world of her painting.

Elizabeth Plessa

(Foreword in the catalogue of Varvara Liakounakou's solo exhibition at Art Space 24, Athens, 2008)