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Eleni Dori Tiziana Conti |
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The eighties reproposed the necessity of a pictorial culture, as the American philosopher Arthur C. Danto clearly states. He examines the return of painting on the artistic scene in the light of a "refined post-modernist adventure". On one side a path is opened towards a decisive figuration which, after a long period of default, seeks alternative routes by recuperating pictorial representation. On the other side, abstract painting, defined by Clement Greenberg as the "inevitability of history", demands to be no longer identified with purity or with analytical and aseptic rigour. Both sides, therefore, reject stereotypical connotations: the figure attempts to draw from the wholeness of existence while abstraction repels the ghost of clarity and geometric formality. Thanks to these "dismissals" a new painting has been developed which moves its principles towards soft frontiers and substitutes the sterile dichotomies with a dialectic conception which fades their outlines. In this pictorial environment, structured on complementarity rather than conflict, is positioned Eleni Dori’s research. The starting point is the everyday object. In her first paintings during the eighties, she deals mainly with objects taken from the environmental context such as windsocks used in airports or saws used in factories. |
These matrices converge into a research which requests a dynamic context, with clear connotations, interweaved with synestesias and chromatic impastos. The canvas is often of large format, almost as if the painting wishes to invade space and find a breath in the universe. Colour is never chosen beforehand: it grows with slow layers and at the end the whole surface is covered by a "veil" which in parts seems to come off to reveal the traces of an indelible origination. The painting retains in itself the žow of time and of events, a patina of the antique, images that seem to vanish unexpectedly and be reborn in a reflection of suggestions and a glare of lights. Outlines seem at times to emerge, at other times to disappear;objects become part of an iconography now rareŽed and then thickened, going beyond representation, projecting themselves towards an open horizon, in order to construct an archaeology of spirit and memory. Separations are recomposed, suspended by a thread that manages to bring out the metamorphic instability of the reality through the transformation of the signs which "go over" the canvas. Perceptively the painting has a balanced composition; the figurations,free from the ties with analytical logic, are "light", and appear to dance on the canvas; the details transmit and communicate vibrations, without disguises. |
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In this proposition, however, there is no demystifying intention or wish to indict fetishism or conformism. There is no more concern with an art which intends to emphasise everyday obsessions. The object is rather considered as a primary element which becomes "curious" since it reminds us of something other than itself. Looking at it carefully,the object is an open form which determines a chain reaction of metamorphic states; beneath its appearance one can see, repeating Max Bense’s words, a different "reality" that is pictorially evidenced by lines, contours or shadows which widen its significance. Deviations, shifts, jumps, create at the completion of the painting process a structure entirely different from the initial one,although the distinctive character of uniqueness still remains. Dori singles out in the object an internal life which allows it to be regenerated; she puts forward a kind of a recurrent skeleton-form, the cylinder, a geometric form which is characterised, apart from its equilibrium and harmony, by stability but which can also be manipulated and elaborated in an infinite game of combinations and postures. In that way painting acquires the faculty to suggest rather than to define,leaving plenty of space to imagerie, overcoming the ambiguities and the flatness of habit. |
The object, liberated from its "thingness" becomes absolute in a dimension where silence, as the poet Paul Celan asserts,is a non-pronounced word. Here the ghosts of the everyday are exorcised, one remains listening between desire and amazement. Reverberating presences. It is as if Dori wishes to suggest that there exists a secret -and joyful- life in things: one needs only to let it flow not to make it conventional. The work lays between the discovered and the invented, actual and at the same time archaic. The group of paintings presented in this exhibition is centred in the theme of antique furniture. The starting point is the object as it is presented in photographic reproductions in magazines or catalogues of the kind: it is selected, however, on the basis of precise characteristics. It is always furniture of high commercial value, so elaborated as to become redundant, even mannered. They become the pretext for a pictorial režection: they are put back into their context and are emphasised through modifications aiming to underline their most conspicuous characteristics. For instance, a travelling desk (Scrivania da viaggio) provides the opportunity for four paintings which, by their titles, show an attitude towards an operation both pictorial and semantic: the desk is transformed from time to time into Scarpiera da viaggio,Cultura da viaggio,Pittura da viaggio,Cilindri da viaggio |
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The image does not undergo a process leading to the loss of its context but, on the contrary, it immaterialises, becoming evident only by its outlines, being crossed by memories and oblique, asymmetric, references. The shadow becomes the alter ego of the form, its enigmatic and unexpressed double. The narrative frame extends in a free space where the pictorial language is continuously reformulated. All is evident and yet mysterious, real but indefinite. Painting is revealed as an adhesive material capable of an evocative "story-telling", always remaining on the border line between the definition of the image and the concept, between narrative and contingency. Such an approach towards reality is probably also influenced by the confrontation of the artist with cultures of various countries,the messianic classicism of Greece (her country of origin), the peculiar mixture of aesthetics and ethics of England (where she studied and worked) and the crucible of the Apollonian and Dionysian of Italy (where she lives today). |
The four titles, ironically, shift the emphasis towards a range of possibilities linked with the theme of travel "within" which the original object is metamorphosed, loosing -or rather emphasising?- its character of precious futility. Dori’s painting is a "progressive painting" which generates a complex visual phenomenology. It seems to be asking the observer to move around it and inside it without ever pretendind to exhaust it. In fact, looking for certainties at any cost, would effectively mean interrupting the call of the myriad of signs which link our feeling with the creative process. Tiziana Conti |
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| En Plein Air | ||||
| Maionese | ||||
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| italianversion |