WHAT I SEE WΗΕΝ THE STREET WALKS OVER ME
by Theophilos Tramboulis [Art Critic & Writer/ Text from the solo show catalogue, April '25]
The forms of Kiki Kolympari look like solid masses that are melting, like vaguely familiar objects diffracted behind a wet pane of glass, elongated and twisted as the laws of some inner, mental physics tamper with our vision and distort their shapes. According to the artist the starting point is always specific objects and relations, but their painterly reworking reminds us of anamorphosis-that illusionary technique as exemplified by the skull, the memento mori in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors. Already known since antiquity, anamorphosis is meant either to showcase the artist's technical prowess or to allude to the hidden signs of the world; it changes the image's perspective and proportions so that the form becomes twisted or illegible when seen from the front, and is only restored when the viewer adopts a specific vantage point outside the artwork. In Kiki Kolympari this vantage point is not there; the works have no keys for recognising their reference objects and the artist herself insists on not revealing them, true to the modernist tradition which holds that what's interesting is not the representation but the painterly reworking of the experience. The objects and their relations have been absorbed into the realm of abstraction.
Yet it is worth sidestepping what we might call this 'concealment of representation', obviously not in order to betray the pragmatological starting point in the painting of Kolympari but so as to see what is inscribed in her works.
Initially inscribed is the body, as a series of formal properties such as colour, spatial layout or the design elements that retain some faint organic memories-for instance, the pink colour of flesh, the inclination of the central figure and the cellular spots in her work In Near Distance (2023). This is not to say that the figures necessarily allude to bodies or that we should seek the body as a covert, repressed, distorted painterly and conceptual substratum. On a first level, at least, what is of interest in the art of Kolympari is not the anthropological or psychoanalytical aspect of the body, i.e. the body as a metonymy for the agent or as a map of the discursive mechanisms of power. It is more an air of subtle and diffused corporeality in the overall impression left by the works, which emerges irrespective of their original source: a punctuation from one work to the next, which generates an affective proximity with the viewer and evokes a sensuality, sometimes subdued and sometimes heightened. In a way, it is like a reminder that however fluid the forms, the painting always remains anthropocentric.
Also inscribed in Kolympari's works is motion. In certain cases the inscription of motion comes from the traces of representation, as in the Shortcuts triptych of 2023 where the left-side section shows a steering wheel and a mirror, suggesting that the agent of painting is on the move; elsewhere, motion is suggested by the title, as in Rush (2023), Set Off (2023), or Journey on a Mirage (2023), where the central figure rises like a ship which, as suggested by the sandy colour on the lower part of the painting, is spectrally crossing a desert and reminds us of Arthur Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat: "…And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes/Drowned men sank backward to sleep!...". Most of all, however, motion emerges from within the painterly gesture itself and not through a denoting act like the title or the represented object. In Overall (2023), the overlaid brush strokes of the central figure as well as those red and brown ones in the top third of the canvas convey the impression of speed. Similarly, the distortions in Vivid Immobility (2023) or Rush give the impression that the viewer sees the objects while he/she is on the move. In the diptych of Counterpoint (2023) the painterly treatment of motion is, I would say, the core theme of the work, with a double gesture: on the left-had side with the perspective repetition of the cell-like shape which reminds you of the orbit of a celestial body as recorded by a static camera, and on the right-hand side with the compressed, pleated forms as if this was a spectrograph. In any case, I would not recommend that we saw motion in the painting of Kolympari as a study in wandering, travelling or escaping-all those things with which we usually associate movement in art. On the contrary, I suggest that this is a ruse meant to capture a parameter which is much more elusive and much harder to deal with in painting, a parameter fundamentally associated with motion in terms of both physics and philosophy: time.
It is particularly interesting to trace how a special marking of the source of light in the composition keeps recurring in the works of Kolympari. Thus in The Tamer (2023), Cross City Interior (2019), Home (2023), Journey on a Mirage and Over All, among others, a triangle of an almost cubist geometry invades the surface from the top and stakes its own territory of light. Once again, I claim that what emerges from the works in a painterly way is a pragmatological element which, in the first two instances (Cross City Interior and Home) is also stated in the title: that is, the delineated source of light and its point of entry suggests that these are interior spaces associated with a nexus of psychological (and anthropological) dynamics, often contradictory and never resolved by the rest of the work's elements: familiarity and entrapment, resignation and refuge, stagnation and security, idleness and suffering. While the colours, the large surfaces and often the titles of the works suggest a playful and happy landscape, the space of the works is for the most part an inner space, in the sense of both physical confinement and emotional condition.
The abstraction of Kiki Kolympari-joyous, colourful and undulating on a first level-inscribes a precarious and agitated sentimentality, time as a one-way motion, the tension of a closed space, and thus allows a glimpse into the mental more than the representational starting point of the works. It is an anamorphosis meant to place viewers at a specific point in space and get them to look at the work in a way which will restore their mental dynamic'a dynamic that hovers between exposure and concealment.
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TRAVELLER
by George Mylonas [Art Historian/ Text from the solo show catalogue, April '24]
Kiki Kolympari loves travelling by train. In front of the window, speed transforms the landscape, blurring images and creating a fluid, colourful world, sensorially surrendered to a love free of prejudice. Her painting feels much the same: indeterminate images, floating objects, chromatic clusters with blurred elements emerge before our eyes, beyond the tracks of memory.
Her gaze is initially drawn to objects from everyday life, familiar subjects, as though she wishes to penetrate them and discover another truth hidden behind the obvious. There is an acceptance of given coordinates and, at the same time, an attempt to dissolve the preconceived image. Colourful fragmented objects condense into solid masses, into metaphysical cubist studies distinguished by a pulsating inner light. It is a post-pop iconographic sensibility that does not coldly describe what the painter examines. In revealing what she sees, she reveals herself.
At Stand in Line - Art Space, the artist presents a body of works that emerge from her psychic hinterland and possess the texture of the complex mechanisms of fantasy and dreams, of reverie and free association. A work may originate from an image of everyday life and then develop associatively and freely, towards directions that have not been consciously chosen, through colours and motifs that at first glance may seem foreign or even disconnected from one another. Kolympari appears to embrace the surprise encountered in the very act of painting. Familiar gestures, contrasts, but also accidental discoveries all form part of a process that offers a thread - the loose end of Ariadne’s thread that the painter unravels throughout the act of creation until the final brushstroke. The principal aim, therefore, is an intuitive approach to the image. Her ticket is composed not only of images of reality, memory, or contemplation, but above all of their coexistence with motifs and symbols within the boundaries revealed by the rich materiality of colour upon the canvas.
Traces of realism within non-realistic environments seem to speak of the hidden truths that orchestrate our world each time anew. It is as though the painter has entered another dimension and retrieved, on our behalf, the precious instant we now behold. Yet her painting offers no compass by which the viewer may position themselves with certainty. It remains open to each gaze, to interpretations that lead towards countless journeys between the obvious and the obscure, the visible and the concealed.
And although her paintings may not present an easily legible subject, her brushwork is far from innocent; it is not the result of impulse or violent gesture. Within the dimensions of the canvas, she achieves a management of tonal and luminous scale that grants the emerging figures or objects a three-dimensional presence. Though not overtly “material” - in the sense of employing thick impasto - her painting nonetheless carries sculptural ambitions. She does not carve into the paint itself upon the canvas, yet she carves the texture of volumes, assigning them different surfaces and weavings, inscribing upon them. At the same time, she juxtaposes luminous and dark surfaces, full and empty forms, formations that retrieve familiar figures through shifting chromaticities. There is a palpable sense of three-dimensionality within poetic compositions that seem to penetrate one another. There is also the memory of chiaroscuro, lending them the quality of sculpture, while simultaneously drawing from the metaphysical dimension of the relationship between light and darkness according to the Byzantine tradition (in addition to painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, she also studied Byzantine iconography, encaustic painting, fresco, and sculpture).
For the first time in Cyprus, Kiki Kolympari shares a personal map of imaginary scenographies and windows opening onto otherworldly places. Their truth lies in her continual movement between the desire to create new destinations and the expression of a sensibility deeply connected to emotional intensity. Within her compositions one detects an attempt at self-analysis. The need to articulate space reflects her profound anxiety to define her place and relationship to the world and her environment. It is a journey of life and art in which the exploration and observation of colour, nature, and light never truly come to an end.
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AFTERIMAGES
by Jurriaan Benschop [Writer & Curator/ Text from the solo show catalogue, May '22]
“I start with a general idea: a light source, some color, an atmosphere, and an idea of shape. Then Ι 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 the solo show 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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In the first person
"I am drawn to that moment in time when something I am looking at has not yet become clear to me, and I am still trying to decipher it - a tiny image on a phone screen, for instance, or a scene unfolding in the distance. In the course of this attempt at interpretation, I often create amusing associations. Like people who are hard of hearing and mishear a word, repeating instead something that merely rhymes with it. Except that the rhymes I produce are visual.
As long as images remain obscure, they open up a vast spectrum of possible explanations and grant me unlimited freedom in translation. After all, if something is not specific, it can be anything. This freedom is deeply important to me, and in my work I try to “restore” such a state of ambiguity - a condition in which things have not yet been defined or confined by their roles. In this way, a kind of game is set in motion, one that ultimately brings me closer to myself.
I find this visual “ambiguity” in sounds and in music as well. For example, in the mysterious chords that emerge while musicians are tuning and trying to synchronize their instruments before a major concert. There too, I find myself trying to “discover” the melody.
When I begin a work, I usually have in mind how certain elements will be placed and how much space they will occupy. Yet everything is often overturned because, as I paint, reality enters the work as well - all that I had not accounted for, my obsessions, and of course, the “mistakes.”
I allow this to happen because I find it extraordinarily interesting how much one can learn from how certain things displace others. I try to identify the “small and insignificant” elements that may ultimately make the difference, define something, give it meaning. In other words: what is it that can make a situation function, transform it, redefine it? A superficial example would be this: if colors x and y sit next to one another even though they clash, even though they “shouldn’t,” what is it that can overturn this imbalance and unite them harmoniously? What are those “major details” capable of changing everything? But as I said, this is only a superficial example.
Painting, with the limitless creative freedom it offers me, also calls on me to cultivate discipline - to recognize situations and manage them. After all, I find that every small or large issue in art is reflected in everyday life. The riddles, the theorems, the rules, and the equations of painting are the very same ones that apply to life itself."
- 2024
" 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."
- 2019
