angeliki xynou

The Color of Unbearable Emotions

Pistils and Stamens, Grocer’s, King Lear, A Dusty Chandelier, Fallen Stage Curtain. Angeliki Xynou’s subjects are scenes of the world. And she views things from the theater balcony box. We are dealing with an art of seeing that converses inextricably with speech, literature and theater. Each work recounts a compact story, A rainy night in a cul-de-sac… 
Yet the manner in which she portrays – depicts is far from any imitation of the real. The bold use of color, the ever-present – manifest or invisible – grid, the asymmetries, sfumato, transgression of perspective and proportions all lead the relationships within the aesthetic field to a separate world in regard to real or represented objects.
Reality and its representation whether it involves a bookstore or a Chekhovian persona are projected – drawn (sketched) on top of one another in such a way that surprises and reveals. 
Because for Angeliki Xynou, more than submitting herself to a seemingly serious aesthetic edict she strives to undermine certainties about seeing by delivering things as they are given to us: in a quivering condition.
We never look at what is in front of us. Seeing is always and at every moment the product of a relationship as “the thing we are looking at is looking at us too” and that transforms us. The aleatory way the paint drips or the hues that surface when the base is formed “talk” about how we see: never geometrically, neatly, symmetrically, panoptical, mimetically or naturally. We look with all of our memories, all of our knowledge in a way that is simultaneously conscious and unconscious. We look with that fragmented way of being that is ours every moment and escapes us. We look not only with our eyes but with all our senses. In Angeliki Xynou’s work often an object detaches itself morphologically or conceptually from the whole, sometimes to reveal itself as disproportionate and sometimes to change its function, or to be “erased” leaving only its trace. But isn’t this the way in which we apprehend history and reality? This is what the works we have before us proclaim. As if these works figure and reveal the very experience of seeing. 
Works that ultimately find themselves in the realm of in-between: as if you don’t know whether something is just about to take shape or if it is going to disappear. It is in this territory that Angeliki Xynou. tests the limits of her art. 
An art that next to the visible things it offers us, it makes invisible, intimate and unpictured things reveal themselves to us.

Flâneur Rustin
December 2023