Adding to our Sensibility

When people hear the term "Painting from life", they probably think of a person holding a pencil, his arm outstretched, looking through half closed eyes at a naked, often obese body. Or, what comes to mind is someone up at the crack of dawn carrying an easel and paints to the summit of a hill, to produce an infinite number of variations of the same tree; a "morning" version, an "afternoon" version and so on.
Perhaps we should not call it "painting from life". Perhaps it should just be called "painting". I think that painting, or to be exact, western painting, despite all the mutations it has undergone through the ages, has always been and remains a practice fully circumscribed and self contained (something akin to football: you can grab the ball with your hands if you wish, but in that case you are playing an entirely different game). European football is a game with rules set during the collective sensibility of time. The rules of the game do not necessarily belong to the realm of oppression; they belong to the realm of the particular. If the mission of the scientist/thinker is to extract the universal from the particular, then the artist's mission is to extract the particular from the universal.
Let us attempt to solve a persisting misconception; the case of the painter that places an easel in the open air and struggles to reproduce the vista, who belongs to modernism; it belongs to what we call recent times.
Modernism is said to "break the integrity of the picture plain"; the painting of the old masters was described as illusionism. Thus all western painting, give or take a few, is studio painting. Irrespective of what the information may be based on, whether the subject matter that excites the painter is based on memory or observation, what ends up on the canvas relates more to painting conventions than with actual reality. Like western physics or mathematics, western painting is a system, as mentioned above, already confined and contained. It is the effort of man to put the world into an order that he can understand. In short, painting belongs to the imagination.
Some painters struggle to maintain their conviction that painting is basically the same as it has always been. They wrestle with artistic conventions, fight to create order within the frame of the picture plane; Maria Filopoulou is one of these.
Right from the start, with her first exhibition she demonstrated a deep consciousness of the flat surface. This might sound a bit literary, but it is not. The drama of painting lies in that consciousness. It is perhaps the most important, the most defining convention of the art of painting; that painting takes place on a flat surface. The fact that every shape of colour that we place on that surface has a relationship with another, on the same surface, does not necessarily mean that we are creating a sense of space. The relationship between those two colours must be specific, extending as a continuum from one edge of the surface to the other; it must work in a way that we can "read". To achieve that, we use the properties created on the surface. Every decision that a painter takes, every mark placed on the canvas, confirms the creation of space out of two dimensions. It is not a lie. It is not an illusion. It is the coexistence - and necessary conflict - of surface and space that constitutes the essence of painting.
Two of Maria Filopoulou's paintings called Turkish Hammam serve as excellent examples. The water is painted as an almost flat surface. The canvas is also a flat surface. It is impossible to create a sense of space with two flat surfaces, one on top of the other - therefore a light blue wall will not look like the sea. Thus, when artists paint the sea, they need perspective (one of many heritages of Leonardo Da Vinci), and graduate their colour from the most solid to the least solid, from dark to light, until everything fades out at the horizon. This is an image imprinted in the human brain, so any surface painted in blue horizontal stripes, with the nearest in bright blue, and the rest progressively greyer, creates a sense of space and distance.
What happens if the distance is short and our brain does not recognise the image? Maria Filopoulou renders the perspective with larger brush strokes and marks in the foreground that progressively grow smaller. But above all, she uses rhythm (when we first met, I said that her paintings remind me of a stave). The small red, ochre and orange swimmers are the pegs that the water surface clings to. In the first Turkish Hammam the two straight lines serve as borders and engulf the water, but in the second one those lines are absent; it is the swimmers that dance about while clinging to their positions. They have a rhythm that can be "read" across the canvas. It is an admirable solution.
I much admire one of the paintings of swimmers at Lerapolis. Not only because it depicts realism, while being a construction of the imagination, but also because it uses the same solution as Hammams only, in reverse. All the swimmers have their heads above the surface of the water. The way Filopoulou achieves this is clever and intricate; it seems that the small dark shapes begin with the head and then pour into the water; the colours of the bodies appear like clothes in a washing machine.
One of the many aspects of this artist's work that I particularly appreciate is the way that it reminds me of Titian, Vel?zquez, Rembrandt and Vermeer. They all have a common characteristic; when viewed from a distance you observe painstaking detail; but as you approach, it seems to dissolve i.e. Vermeer's Girl with the Red Hat. From a distance the hat appears to have been painted feather by feather; when you approach, it emerges as a deceptively simple red splodge. Filopoulou's work presents similar characteristics. From a distance the water gleams as though each wave is meticulously painted. The pebbles reflect the light, white and grey, the sand stretches out grainy and light, everything conveys the feeling of equivalence with nature; but as you get closer, the work transforms into drippings, brush strokes and marks. At times it looks as if she has wiped her brush on the canvas.
Maria Filopoulou's painting is a timely addition to our sensibilities. She does not hide her influences or her roots. Her work is courageous. She shares a common history with all other good artists, and - as good painting does - her work depends on experiences that are personal to her, but she is imaginative and inventive with situations and solutions through which her work unravels and functions. She describes the introspection of the western artist - the artists who paint not what they know, but what they see.
That is no meagre feat. For the last six hundred years it has been the essence of our existence.

Augustine Zenakos

Paintings that Emerge from the Sea

Maria Filopoulou loves painting; her paintings reflect that love and radiate their own beauty. There are many kinds of beauty. This relates purely to things we love, which as objects of our desire, respond by becoming even more beautiful.
In her current work Filopoulou presents a new vision: beneath her surface of idyllic images, floats the suggestion of mutation. The clear blue water seethes with swimmers that disturb its calmness, and alter its nature. The water, which appears to be a scenic sanctuary for bathers, is transformed into a totally different element. The essence of its character changes: something else materializes through those subtle light effects. The sea has mutated into a kind of primeval cosmic soup, teeming with iridescent life.
The sea responds to the artist and becomes a life-force, a creator - not just empty water - it gives birth to a multitude of diving, floating, glistening agile bodies that resemble early forms of life. The artist has also undergone a transformation; she is not merely painting images; she too is creating life. She has transformed her paint into sea, and into bodies aroused by the sensuous contact of the water gliding over them.
This chromatic matrix suggests an event, a happening: the work itself seems to represent the body of the artist, who gives birth in both a creative and embryonic physical sense. Through the painted objects - the bodies enjoying the water - Filopoulou is personally involved, diving into this playful element. She too intimately enjoys the sheer physicality of the gleaming bodies.
Maria Filopoulou loves painting, and loves herself as a painter; she has a unique relationship with the sea. She adores it and fills it with pearl-fleshed bodies that share her enjoyment. Her seas are full of splendour, light and luminosity, populated by fragile iridescent sea creatures, which transform her into another entity; she becomes one with the water, and the water becomes one with her, and she emerges to paint the experience.

Daniel Sibony
Based on a translation from the French