Gogo Ieromonachou

Ne.ni.o - Omnia Vanitas

25 Oct – 24 Nov 2018 Athens CURATED BY Manos Stefanidis

The world ceases to be dark when we narrate it. Colors and words are the spiritual light, that only saints and artists can see. What do we have here? Painting that makes good use of the great European visual tradition with sensitivity and knowledge, whilst it wants to talk personally through identification, elaborate symbolisms and theatrical tranvestism. Painting that exploits large scales, the dramatic gestures to talk about great passions, dramatic moments that concern both the artist and the viewer who submits himself to the rules of such game. A game in which the canvas becomes a theatre stage on which images of a past that never ceased to be current and of a present that eternally seeks its interpretation, come to life. A game, which demands of the figure to not only have a morphoplastic nature, but also to be a role, a persona which passionately narrates. A face-mask sometimes immensely grotesque, sometimes fiercely deformed, sometimes a clownish caricature and sometimes a mirror of an expressionist drama telling stories. A kind of Neo-Baroque scenography of the self… Something which is pleasantly surprising, especially in an era where painting is either academically programmed, or conceptually programmatic. In the depths of Ieromonachous’ mind, I believe, one is the stake: how to blend the language of painting ongoing with her need to narrate brief adventures of the psyché with color and form, and to nail down imagination flow on something more stable, exploiting a plethora of decorative inventions. To make the intuitive, aesthetic… The canvas of Ieromanachou is dominated by deep violets, which eventually become triumphant reds … like the color of the wine that Jesus, the great artist, created in his miracle at the Wedding at Cana. Because in Painting, much like with miracles, the red color is more precious than blood. And because every painting is a free dive into the infinity of white or the infinity of black. Like Odysseus’ dive into Hades, like a Nekyia of pictures. Since only through darkness, light can be born.

So what have we got here? Painting on the right path…

Manos Stefanidis, 4/10/2018