Irini Karayannopoulou

Vitamin Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present the first Italian solo exhibition of Irini Karayannopoulou.

 “At school I was self-conscious, I used to have thick hypermetropic glasses and a bandage on the eye which made me look like a pirate”. Irini Karayanopoulou seems to have learnt how to accept the role that her schoolfellows had given her, to come to terms with this, working out her own Neverland, able to challenge the "gravity" of a daily existence which often shows us its hostile side, its harshness, since the first years of life. In her drawings, realized with convulsive stroke and at the same time with a fragile elegance, images with an adventurous taste take shape. Their illustrative character recalls the atmospheres of Robert Louis Stevenson’s or James Matthew Barrie’s tales, and also that little cruelty which is breathed in the ancient stories - before they were purged by Andersen and Grimm brothers - definitely written for the childhood, but conceived above all as an initiating rite to mark the passage to maturity.

Actually the Athenian artist-at her first solo show in Italy -affirms to conceive the creative process as a kind of "ritual", through which her subjects and her energies can run out with an intense and obsessive action.

The drawings and the unseen video-animation, exhibited in this show, reassemble fragments of a short and pyrotechnic narrative, whose slight protagonists wander lost way between the wild architectures of a jungle which is perniciously spread on the magic space of the sheet, saturating in a few subjects the whole of the composition. The figures, prevalently in white and black, appear as impalpable as that of a dream than can change colour at day-break; only few details are coloured, like the violet "amphibians" of the young man with the crest that is going to kill himself in front of a wonderful background or the dinosaur which seems to take form from a sky laceration, through a hallucinatory mechanism similar to the dream-like and visionary universe, ruled by the metaphor and the metamorphosis, from the continuous shifting of the images one in the other. The oddity which qualifies these works definitely reminds the Renaissance grotesque, also for the capacity to combine precious form and expressive force.

The sensation that there is something that does not answer to the logics of the wake state is confirmed by the fireworks, that appear in a few paintings: they almost seem imploding, sinking in a sky from the unlikely colours. In the drawings the natural landscape prevails, but the climate of peace of the Arcadia seems lost. The nature proliferates in an anarchic and indiscriminate way in order to choke and to reject the human presence. An oppressive and menacing reality is sublimated by the phantasmagorical imagination and the detachment from the world is confirmed by the hairstyles of two alter-egos of the artist (a pretty dancer and a punk boy) which escape from the usual laws of the gravity. The setting in time too is indefinite and vague. The scholar Gustav René Hocke was convinced that the XVI-XVII centuries Mannerism developed with reference to a more or less idealized past but the contemporary mannerism is always a-historical, if not anti-historical.

Also the punk ideology worked out in 1977 is a radical negation of history and as a matter of fact a future, to exalt an eternal present being influenced by " don' t care ", deprived of any concerns. It is an answer to a crisis, the desire of freedom towards the formal rigours of the "civil" existence, through a hedonism which tries to idealize the primitive life and not the refined and decaying research for the pleasure.

The paradox of an escape from the vanity of the world through the experimentation of its pleasures gave life for instance, with the assertion of the merchant class in Japan, to the richest and most influential art of "fluctuating world"  ( " ukyio-e "). But it is also true – Sartre docet - that the lack of a last sense and the perspective of a freedom produce a sense of nausea and dizziness: a collateral effect which turns out to be the adventurous journey of the two brothers "whose hair challenges the force of gravity". There’s nothing else to do but to agree with it…

Luca Vona

Irini Karayannopoulou. Born in 1973 Thessalonica, Greece, she lives and works in Athens. She graduated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Saint Etienne, in France and then she participated in an artist residency program at the Staatiche Akademie der Bildende Kunste, in Karlsruhe, Germany. In the 2004, she exhibited in a solo show “Showroom” at the Unlimited gallery in Athens. In the same year, she participated in some group shows at the galleries Art in General and White Box in New York. She also exhibited in several private spaces in Greece, France and Germany. Indicated by the art magazine Tema Celeste in November 2005, it’s her first solo show in Italy.
 

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