AFTERIMAGES
by Jurriaan Benschop [Writer & Curator/ Text from "Afterimages" catalogue, May '22]
“I start with a general idea: a light source, some color, an atmosphere, and an idea of shape. Then I leave it open; I want to see what will happen while I work. I want to give chance a chance.” - Kiki Kolympari
The motifs that are depicted in Kiki Kolympari’s work have familiar features, yet it is not usually possible to fully identify what objects and situations the artist had in mind when she started the painting. Some of them behave like words on the tip of your tongue, almost but not fully recognizable. What is depicted could be a bag, a trunk, a shopping cart, or a figure seeing itself in the mirror. In multiple paintings, there is a human presence – the color of skin, body-shaped curves, or hints of a person in an interior, a building, or a landscape.
The paintings have one foot in the world as we know it and the other foot in abstraction and imagination. The artist extracted certain shapes from what she saw, and then she changed the color, allowed a line or detail to grow, to have a life of its own. She let accidents happen, let paint run or drip. She moved away from what was observed and instead directed her attention to the dynamics the shapes evoke, creating an afterimage or a further development of the initial motif.
What happens when we look at a painting and cannot immediately name the things depicted? We can look at other aspects: at texture, at details, at how a curve bends, at how two colors bond or contrast. The paintings offer us a range of sensibilities caused by colors at play. These aspects relate primarily to the question of how it was painted, not what was painted.
What can be appreciated in Kolympari’s approach is how she shifts gears within individual works. Firm, decisive brushstrokes evoking speed press against other areas where the paint is brought on thin or remains calm. Bold gestures give the paintings a general outline, a sense of stability, while softer and gentler areas create nuances. The works present themselves as a play of balancing forces.
The question of how something is painted points to the haptic quality of painting, a feeling of touch that can best be enjoyed close to the surface, practically right on top of the work, to observe precisely how things are made. A few steps further back, the focus is on the orchestration of the whole, the play between fore- and background, the compositional balance, a feeling of floating or gravity, and, sometimes, a scene that reveals itself as an interior or view to the outside. There are competing conceptions of space within the paintings, the flatness of the painted surface broken by the occasional illusion of depth.
With these works, the artist does not attempt to educate or make any points about the state of the world, the next crisis, or the right solution. Rather, she presents a series of visual situations that have their roots in daily life, but were transformed into something different. A painted presence that is just as much illusion as it is material fact.
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COLOUR AND VIGOUR
by Nikos Vatopoulos [Writer & Journalist/ Text from "Kathimerini" newspaper article, Feb. '19]
The world of Kiki Kolympari, kinetic, deep, colorful, is revealed in her solo show at the Athens Art Gallery. Many paintings are large, robust in composition and bold in execution.
Kiki Kolympari officiates in a self-existent and independent universe and generates more senses than images. After all, her painting is on the verge of abstraction and representation, but in this case this seems insignificant, as the works themselves define a way of looking at them.
A love scene dominates, in one of the large-scale works. In this work, I observed the multiple coatings, erased surfaces, the interlaced subjects, the gaps between the plateaus of bright colors, the pulsating bodies that radiate warmth and impatience.
Kiki Kolympari seems to have a deep pool of references from art history, evident even in a portrait without facial features. There, in a paradoxical sense, I recalled portraits of the Dutch "Golden Age". Despite the distance from the result, there are silent and invisible channels.
The exhibition gives us works of a high level in both: aesthetics and intellectual starting point.
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PLANTED OCCURRENCES
by Charis Kanellopoulou [Art historian/ Text from "Planted Occurrences" catalogue, Feb. '19]
“You are not supposed to see it, you are supposed to feel it …
Cézanne said that every brushstroke has its own perspective [,] its own point of view.” - Willem de Kooning, 1971[1]
Upon contemplating the works of Kiki Kolympari, you get to think that her painting is primarily an event and at a second stage an image. This is not just due to the energy her creations exude: as soon as you see each work, your gaze is captured by the dynamic colours, the full volumes, the sharp divisions of the surface, the spontaneous visual rhythm. In every painting you can sense the variegated "puzzle" of the composition: opting for elaborate formations and interchanging textures as well as sharper passages through painterly densities and mixtures of matter and content, Kolympari moulds new worlds through unexpected yet deliberate "painterly assemblages" of pop chromatic tension, expressionistic vocabulary and an underlying surrealistic structure with personally defined points of reference and variously open paths of interpretation.
The painting of Kolympari comes to confirm the fact that even the most mundane everyday moments can trigger new, explosive points of view. The initial images she chooses as her source of inspiration and redefines through her visual processing are indeed among those ordinary or even trivial moments of daily life. These days, however, such moments are not simply lived as experiences or merely accumulated as memories; most of them form part of our incessantly flowing digital worlds and are swiftly shared and consumed.
In developing each work, Kolympari chooses anew the viewpoint for exploring this familiar and consumable material: in her mind she drafts a "personal diary" aimed at liberating the images from their external complexity and charting their paths on the canvas so as to release all their original ideas through her visual idiom. All the familiar features are now filtered through emotion, deconstructed and repositioned in search of the aftertaste they leave. The guide in this process is the language of abstraction, which liberates from representation, creates suitable spaces where colour becomes autonomous and enables painterly "subversions" in terms of moulding forms and exploring new meanings. In the paintings of Kolympari parts of human figures and other abstract elements are variously joined and reassembled in a visual outcome that asserts the freedom of the unclarified and often leaves you with a sense of "incompleteness", as if the forms are still in a process of motion and creation of a new definition for them.
All this creates the feeling of a visual "fissure" in the works of Kolympari, an opening that seems to allow you to sense the painted reality as "real" and "pulsating" in terms of both the rendering of gesture and the time of its creative process. The same opening seems also to allow the seeds of her quests to flourish: in her emphatic painterly occurrences Kolympari sows the seeds for finding the sincerity of things, wishing to allow the growth of her personal truth but also, through viewing, of the personal truth of others. It is a process of persistent, incessant testing which spawns the expectation of a potential rebirth and inner catharsis.
[1] Cited in Shiff, Richard (2008), Doubt, New York and London: Routledge, 92.
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Life inspires us. No more than that.
by George Kazazis [Professor at the Athens Schools of Fine Arts/ Text from "Planted Occurrences" catalogue, Feb. ´19]
If we see this inspiration as a kickoff rather than a narrative event, then the gain is essentially a clear course towards an artistic reworking. The rest is no one's concern.
Using this reworking as her axis, Kiki Kolympari gives the leading role to random trivialities on which she projects key personal experiences, enlarging the mundane. Then she turns to the highly communicative elements she employs in her painting and tries to demythicise her works and strip them of all grand notions.
For the work does not house experience; it is structured by it.
From the two-dimensional printed images of comic magazines to the deliberately physical forms of the objects, every element is now painted in such a way as to bring its character and qualities to life. The special, austere idiom of Kolympari, borrowed from the world of comic strips, reinforces the immediacy of viewing while the simplicity of the image aims at highlighting the directness of the intention.
The artistic handling of her image starts with its transmutation into something else; with shapes that automatically turn into tangible forms as soon as they have escaped the matter that depicts them. Once this chromatic matter has transcended itself and become a free image with a recognizable experiential materiality, then we can read it. Even with a plain colour, in order for us to see it it must submit to the transmutation we impose on it.
Everything can coexist in a painting of Kolympari—in the realistic sense of the term, since words and concepts project their images relationally in the time, the place and the culture of each recipient.
In her work the interactive time of communication is the maturity of the cerebral processing of the experience in relation to memory as emotion and its reworking into a premeditated explosion of ideas, an encounter with her personal ethics and the overflow of the material into the endless realm of the intangible.
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" New perspectives can spring up from within the most insignificant everyday moments. A private photograph, a newspaper article or even a still frame of a movie can be the medium for another dimension. All these are raw materials for me, which I gradually release from any unnecessary feature that traps them into the optically compatible world. I want my paintings to have a universality that goes beyond the context of a particular place, time or person." -Kiki Kolympari
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