2002 KOMPATSIARI - THOUGHTS

TRACING THE INEFFABLE

This group of works is titled ‘Tracing the Ineffable’. The word ‘ineffable’ places certain restrictions on what is expressed in Words. Here it is merely used as a challenge to exceed the limits. Thus, that which is ‘ineffable’ in Words, is effable in art. Because the language of art is capable of self-definition, which it achieves by redefining the broadened limits in all directions, in other words by tracing.
My work as a whole is, I would say, an acrobatic attempt to strike a balance between painting, engraving and poetry, attributing to the latter the concept of Words condensed to the utmost degree. A technique chosen to serve the theme as well as possible.

The elements of gestural painting, which I have also used in earlier works, here impose a direct contrast on the result. They therefore enable one to commune with this sense of immediacy, decisiveness and intensity contained in the dynamic force of an artistic gesture.

Letters and symbols possess their very own distinctive and timeless dynamic force. They could also acquire another significance, over and above the general sense, for each person separately, when called upon to mark a memory or to recall or refer to a temporally or emotionally defined event. They serve as links between the imaginary and the real, the past and the future.
So, on the one hand, the written word, with its thousand-year old history of endurance and undiminished value to this very day, certainly wields a distinctive, notable and indisputable charm.
On the other hand, we have symbols. Those ‘shooting stars’ confine you, forcing upon you a specific way of thought for as long as you can bear their bombardment until they are supplanted by other new, rising stars in a decadent, utopian journey.

Ribbons - labyrinthine routes - options for a contemporary individual.
Paces of life that require and demand quick and correct choices. People, trapped in the doubt and insecurity stemming from their choices in contemporary reality, lose their way in labyrinthine courses and routes, unable to weigh their options quickly and correctly.

I reposed all this dullness, this emotional tension in my illegible writing, transforming it into a potential personal diary of whispers, wishes, desires and… evil eyes, in an endeavour to tame our future.

Maria Kompatsiari
Painter-Thessaloniki 2002