Z.M. Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
French Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
Neon Gallery, Bologna, Itally
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
French Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
La Serre, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Etienne, France
Gallery 7, Athens, Greece
Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
Former Archeological Museum, Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
Maison Hellenique, Paris, France
Gallery Ersi, Athens, Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
Dion-Olympus Municipal Gallery, Litochoro, Greece
Casa Bianca (Thessaloniki Municipal Gallery), Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
F.I.A.P. Exhibition Center, Paris, France
Maison Hellenique, Paris, France
"Greek Artists from Paris", Municipal Gallery of Rhodes & Syros, Greece
Sorbonne E.J.P., Paris, France
XXXo Salon De Montrouge, Paris, France
"Art Action I-II", Ministry of Culture, Athens
"La Rue", Salle polyvalente de la Roquette, Paris, France
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
"Artists from Northern Greece", National Gallery, Athens, Greece
Chess Olympiad, Thessaloniki, Greece
Terracotta - TinT Gallery , Thessaloniki, Greece
"Film and Painting", Thessaloniki, Greece
"Untitled", Mylos, Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
"Untitled", DESTE Foundation - House of Cyprus, Athens + CLICK TO SEE MORE
"Woman in artistic creation", Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
'Exhibition Itinerante Rur Art, Poitou / Charentes, France
"Artists of Northern Greece", Bonn, Luxembourg' Exhibition Itinerante Rur Art, Poitou / Charentes, France
«Dialogues", Palais d'Iéna, Paris
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
"The Pandora's box", Antikenmuseum, Basel, Switzerland
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
"Just Painting", Artforum-Vilka Gallery, Thessaloniki
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
"Greek Painting after 1960", TIF Thessaloniki Cultural Capital of Europe, Greece
+ CLICK TO SEE MORE
"Just Painting". Artforum-Vilka Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
"The Wreath" Mylos, Thessaloniki, Greece
ART Athens, Artforum Gallery, Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
"VISIONS", Kappatos Gallery, Athens - Thessaloniki, Greece + CLICK TO READ MORE
"Summer goes on", Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
"Paper Works", Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece
"Women of two seas", UNESCO "Women of the Medditeranean", Thessaloniki, Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
"Artists Suport Curators" - Exhibition to benefit AICA HELLAS, Kappatos Gallery, Athens - Thessaloniki, Greece + CLICK TO READ MORE
Gallery Ersi, Athens, Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
"Women in business", Thessaloniki Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Greece
"DIALOGUES 1989-1995", French Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece + CLICK TO READ MORE
"ART PLANNINGS BEFORE MATERIALISATION THESSALONIKI-RHODES, CULTURAL BRIDGES", Inn of France, Medieval Town of Rhodes, Greece
+ CLICK TO READ MORE
"Aut viam inveniam aut faciam, either we will find the way or we will make it. dedicated to Haris Savvopoulos", 54th Demetria Festival, "Casa Bianca" Municipa Gallery of Thessaloniki, Greece + CLICK TO READ MORE
"The paintings of Angeliki Siamou are original and dynamic"
The Greek origin, American sculptress Chryssa, visited Angeliki Siamou at her atelier.
THE DUALITY OF THE ORIGINAL
Primary source of data, the primary painting. Of finding the "authority" of the project in the timeliness of work, contacting in a compression of absolute value, obsolete and modern values of artistic skill and reflection. Source mythical, in the abstract and,therefore, an absolute character. Primary forms of paintings, "basic" colors, shapes or simple potential pulse storyline, sometimes only implicitly, by color.The work of Angeliki Siamou draws on the recent memory of artistic culture, review values and standards of modern Post Painterly Abstraction (Rothko, Reinhardt, Newmann, Klein) pushed by radical and "opaque" consequences of (Mangold, Olitsky)and parallel minimal relations. But the review involves a process of cultural reclamation, hot and emotionally where the modern"primacy" of abstract art restored to its distant origins as "Element" Code of painting or molecule in nature, contradictory in one only limited value. In absolute "quality", the substance of the data and the primary painting (form and substance) coincide and a real most identical and reciprocal transfers. Blue, dark red, as if to say day, water, earth, fire.The abstract nature of modern painting seems to reflect the thoughts of the pre-Socratic philosophy, school of Miletus, who interprets the world and its elements. And Greece, a source of eternal and unquestionable culture and knowledge, Greece whose daughter is Siamou, claiming,beyond the limits of modern history, then the thought of staying "as an inner landscape-wrote aptly James Hilman», Essay the Pan"- as a metaphor of the imaginary kingdom that hosts the archetypes in the form of gods," adding that the "return to Greece" is the ideal model of a journey of consciousness, and in the consciousness, pointing to the "re-discovery of the archetypal our mind and our culture, "which is necessary to make one" when the dominant vision that lasts a single period of culture cracks". To conclude finally that "the return to Greece" is not romantic or symbolic aestheticism, but rather a descent into the cave". A journey into the depth of resources, then, through the knowledge of art, as Angeliki Siamou presents us, until just a touch intrusive core of art and nature, where painting and remove absolutely phenomenal form eventually a single, key element.Here are recomposed in dialectical and harmonious complementarity of origin, the different properties of a painting that is range and transfer-not-naturalistic nature and the world.It is understood, in dense fluidized or value of the painting fabric, the boundary between organic and inorganic, color, unstable in floating rate as of the system to a body tends to overcome the limits of the form prime-painted or painting-that include but not be able to limit the pulse of a secret and deep as the heart of an ongoing world beating the distance of time and space. Infinite or infinitesimal, as shown in the immeasurable dimension of work of Siamou: bottomless section of the world, or cryptic cell or molecule, in any case beyond any unit. which won second place.
Reason and emotion, design and memory, active process and appealing ritual share the project's scope of Siamou, where the abstract and geometric minimalist "primacy" of the shapes of paintings (internal or external to the painting) individual, joint or antithetical, sometimes aligned in a row, and even assembled into "environmental" solutions, refers to the symbolic archetypologies. Rationality of the square, spiritualism of the triangle, perfection of the circle, and even the idea of infinity into the space-made time "book of art" composed by Siamou through a series of papers, almost a diary of work before and during the project which accompanies the whole job, a real "book artist" in its entirety, but a "procedural" work that can be exposed with the number of individual pages, as a Heraklition "Everything flows" becoming an image.And beyond time, movement suggestively occurs, among other primitive elements data taken from the painting, where,thanks to the use of poor technology, low capacity, concealed in the project, large round tables slowly rotating, although seemingly motionless because the opposite effect caused by «trompeloeil» painting, create the suggestion of a mythical authority in the world.The modern conception of art is reflected in dictating a mythical and remote thought the "Apollonian" reasoning of painting become blunt into the emotion, the "Dionysian" passion coming out of painting, pumping up from the source, for himself and like-with-abstract transfer and sovereign of the universe and its constituents. One source of "dual" as each new "birth of tragedy".
Angeliki Siamou a fait ses études à Paris à l' E.N.S. des Beaux-Arts et la majeure partie de son activité s'est déployée en France. Son travail, à travers des périodes différentes, s' est progressivement développé en direction des tendances qui préoccupent aujourd'hui un grand nombre de jeunes artistes. On peut affirmer que ses idées sont devenues des forces actives à travers une pratique qui fait intervenir le geste. Mais cette tendance abstraite est accompagnée d' une recherche pour que prennent forme ces explosions par des différenciations et des ensembles de couleurs, de façon à suggérer la conception d' un dessin déterminant.
Celui-ci est la source des pensées et des sentiments qui peuvent provoquer ces oeuvres. Ainsi, la caractéristique principale en est la recher- che d' une liberté sans entraves dans le geste en même temps qu' une relative organisation du travail et de l'oeuvre. Celle-ci s' incarne en formes élémentaires qui délimitent les signes intérieurs et extérieurs de l' image. Ces formes sont tout aussi structurées que gestuelles. Ainsi y-a-t-il quelque part un équilibre entre ces deux tensions.
Un autre élément du travail d' Angeliki Siamou est I omniprésence de la recherche de confrontation entre au moins deux espaces qui semblent se trouver en conflit et créent un troisième espace qui les sépare. Ces espaces semblent rendre de façon explosive des dessins sphériques ou ovales qui pourraient être, à leur tour, des condensations de signes. Ainsi, souvent, ce n'est pas le contour mais avant tout la densité qui détermine la forme. Différentes idées sont alors suggérées; ce sont elles qui relient le travail de l'artiste aux mouvements gestuels des jeunes artistes. Il y a là référence au côté forme plastique de l'oeuvre - donné par les taches, l' explosion des couleurs, le geste qui est complétée à un autre niveau par le symbolisme des représentations. L' intention du peintre est de donner les signes d' un espace cosmique.
Mais ces entrecroisements de tensions, les amoncellements de papiers et de restes de cartons, d'épaisseurs de couleurs constituent en réalité le sujet principal du travail. Il s' agit de recherches qui visent à rendre les phénomènes visuels dans leur plus grande diversité et richesse. Cette façon de peindre est partie prenante d' une recherche de situations primitives qui résultent, par petites étapes, de la combinaison de la maîtrise et du mouvement, sans s' intégrer dans des schémas préexistants. Le résultat final est ainsi une inégalité d' entrecroisements de valeurs de couleurs, qui génèrent en leur sein un petit dessin, une écriture; la correspondance visuelle d' un questionnement de la limite du geste de peindre.
In the School of Fine Arts in Paris she crossed the complexity of gestural activity and conceptual implications. We’ll appreciate the work of Angeliki Siamou by disrupting the work of Angeliki Siamou through petitions and by the disruption of work caused at these: it is the problem of image and concept that was caused in her work and for how these jobs are defined out to the painting surface. The original motion, an original way of working, become persistent form of starting work by defining areas to be occupied later by an independent painterly quality to its sources. Initially there was a single entity whose parts suppress their ability to form a set of individual autonomy. Then followed some less autonomy and more centralized units where the topology of the organizations could mobilize the penetration of one unit to another. The few extensions although limited to local and some explosions stretched a box or enveloped a linear start. After almost wrinkled surfaces whose color constitute the emotion and whose deployments in depth and the surface can be understood, Angeliki Siamou began to structure the freedom of the picture: it was a matter of time, the question of development and superextension on the surface which would absorb every corner of the scene. Thus was created her personal history of how to circumvent the problem of depth and surface. That is the problem of the threshold and the limitation of the problem-modes of description. After a critical period for her personal work she sought to describe these modes of response with successive additions which continued the work-task effectively for the wall and seemed to hang in the extension of infrastructure, the artist returned to the accuracy of parts. But sometimes the eruptions are now substituted in the other direction of simplifying the containment of the gesture by which she retook the motion, the cyclical behavior of motion. From the chromatic complexity she contained overall structure, behavior that resulted in an increasingly evident in the present work, geometry and color of which style works on two levels: on the one hand it is the juxtaposition of color fields with geometric boundary. On the other hand, is the poetic dimension of the slow circular motion of the gesture. From there, these papers focus on the very inside of the conflict, an intense effort of controlled emotion. In this work Angeliki Siamou demonstrated-and perhaps her personal ingenuity-she can pass from one emotion to the organization. These conditions appear to be antithetical to a first approximation. And somehow irreconcilable, at least in the initial reading of the problem. But in fact already the historical experience has overturned the era of American expressionism, those oppositions so that the organization of gesture to be seen and attributed to be the phenomenon of perception. This is the story of the younger artists lived in the personal ways, but it is always the same path, that is to accept the possibility of a color and gestural emotion delete in shifts, the shape of its logic. This is a historical experience that Angeliki Siamou has incorporated in her process of thinking and has lived as reactivates any discovery,-so is the arithmetic whose every restart, gripped the relevant confirmation of the theorem.
So far its not enough anymore to think that the artist interprets different ideas in his ways. We would say-and this concerns the generation of artists who found themselves as artistic experience since 1980 - that the historical experiences are not only confirmed through different personal associations but allow them to be, continue to be reorganized as the necessary conditions of their essential character. Thus will be treated at these work-forwarding the story, the identity of a moment, the fact that the artist here reaffirms, with his personal charge, the theorem. Then we could neither talk for large discrepancies between logic and emotion nor the dramatic confrontations between absolute definitions. It is rather an undulation between historical processes given as the absolute necessity of confrontation, which the artist reactivates paying their represent timeliness and would also be relevant to the experiences of the already historic excess. Belonging to the artist's responsibility to bear them actively, practical, into the artistic process, at the hour of their end. It is a moment of absolute identification of past and future, whose Angeliki Siamou illustrates the stages in an exemplary validity.
"All discourse consists of sensations". Pythagoras
Angueliki Siamou is an artist who talks about herself.
Her works record the traces of a personal adventure along the distant paths of the human thought, a kind of spiritual ecstasy when faced with the infiniteness of the world.
In her work, she seeks for the harmony of unification, of contemplation and of the sensations.
The contemplation in question is that which springs from the perception of the world through the senses and, at the same time, of another world which transends the first and can only be perceived by the mind. The road along which this artist has come is long, and it has circumvented the commonplaces of the merely topical (in the world of art) orientating itself towards those paths which lead back to the wellsprings of human thinking.
Although Siamous's thinking is almost identical with the subjective idealism of antiquity (Heraclitus, Parmenides), her visual discourse renders that idealism in the idiom of contemporary art (in its geometrical dimension).
By means of direct references to the pre-Socratic philosophers (or, to put it more precisely, to the mode in which thinking of that kind interprets the existence and operation of the cosmos), this artist succeeds in conveying a four-colour universe through the medium, primarily, of rectangles and circles.
Positions such as these have, in fact, never ceased to recur not only in the philosophy of art, but in its history as well (Malevitch, Mondrian, Reinhardt, etc.). We can observe them not only in the myths and philosophy of the Orient, but also in many of the works of the Sixties and Seventies (Stella, Antony Caro, etc.). Angueliki Siamou's world is a ballad of the sensations, the indefatigable strength of the four elements: fire, air, earth and water. Her world is red, yellow, black and blue. It expresses itself in co-alignments of elements and colours, in juxtapositions, in harmonies, and in the absolute geometrical forms which surround them.
In this way, her world reveals itself as mysterious, sometimes taking the form of conflicts which release the virtue of energy, and sometimes growing calmer, in absolute equilibrium and serenity.
Angueliki Siamou has a visual language of her own, one which makes a fresh departure in connection with two of the most significant achievements of contemporary art.
The first of these is what contemporary art has called Tachism or Action Painting; in this instance, the condition for the structuring of the work is not a random gesture, as it was for the historic movement which made its appearance in the mid-Fifties, but the significant constriction of the random with simultaneous development of controlled movements by the hand, with painterly composition and with elaborated colour. In her 'single-colour surfaces, Siamou subverts the rhetoric of the gesture and of the movement of colours in search of the energy and intensity which lie in the vital absence of the factors which fulfil some of what we think of as the painterly conditions par excellence: representation, the gesture, geometry, etc. The painterly part of Siamou's artistic work adapts itself to the representative elements that are summed up in the concept of the universe, of earth, of water and so on, and make up the visual composition in the form of a painted splash.
It thus becomes inevitable that concepts as general as this, with such breadth that they mutate into abstraction, should be depicted in the language of abstraction regardless of whether they correspond to the material world.
Seen in this light, the painting of Angueliki Siamou functions as a reconstruction of the im-material and the a-morphous.
The experimentation and exploration of the post-war schools of abstraction - especially in their geometrical varieties - may not have sustained their original feverish pace and intensity, yet nor have they entirely abandoned the field. Many artists continue to employ the idiom of geometry with consistency, to emphasise the importance of systematic thought and a rational approach to form. Form remains a constant a priori of the concepts it contains, elevating ultimate concepts to autonomous meanings.
In contemporary Greek art we may be seeing less interest in exploring the language of geometry, but those who continue to employ its vocabulary are showing all the more determination to find expression for their reflections, to give form to the metaphysical melody of the world, the melody which vibrates to the beat of the Universal.
For many years now Angeliki Siamou has placed her work consistently at that point where visual rationalism, methodical investigation and the controlled gesture encounter subjective idealism and a poetic which is based on exploration of the grandest of cosmological perceptions.
The four elemental colours -red-fire, yellow-air, blue-water and black-earth- were originally enclosed in geometrical forms, high- lighting the dialogue between the limits of form and the structural transformations of its chromatic field. Her compositions - with their frequent references to parallels in the American school - seemed to hover above the history of art, functioning as an intermediary medium, like a kind of Albertian screen, projecting her own artistic quest alongside selected visual concepts of the art of the 20th century.
After a period of silent research and reflection Angeliki Siamou now re-emerges with work which has acquired a significant degree of autonomy, when compared with previous phases in her career. The new work is more mature, but above all shows a new sense of its own identity. The artist's intentions are more evident, while the dialogue between different elements within the work demonstrates more clearly the nature and direction of her creative preoccupations.
There are two new elements in her artistic system. The first involves a new stance towards the painted surface, with its sober presentation of the actual material; the second involves the use of techniques borrowed from photography. Her decision to incorporate these two morphological solutions into the painted surface do not compromise the sober, austere character of the work: the aesthetic harmony is preserved intact. The morphological changes, however, specific as they are, indicate that the artist is turning her attention to particular chapters in post-war art, specifically the late 50's and 60's. This is fertile ground for a dialogue with the history of art; the aesthetic initiative is renewed and made more attractive to the spectator. It should also be noted that Siamou continues to resist the allure of technological and visual variety of form, still sparing in her use of both medium and image.
The image in question is the tree, stripped of its foliage and portrayed as existence both dramatic and poetic, a symbol and image of nature itself. The composition is enhanced by the delicacy of reflection, manifested in the careful draughtsmanship of the tree. reproduced within the image itself as the Platonic idea of the object, its soul and its form.
Today, the recurring strategy of the “neo-” seems as weak as the contrasting logic of the “post-” is worn out: neither ofthe two suffices as a strong example of artistic or cultural practice, and there is no other model that can take their place. For many, this situation represents something good: it allows for artistic freedom and critical diversity.
It is certain that Angeliki Siamou, who is once again exhibiting her work after a long period of absence, is not bound by the strategies of the “neo” and the “post”. Throughout history, many artists have tried to open up the private unconscious to a more collective dimension, and particularly to the Jungian interest in archetypes. However, throughout history once again, art has wondered about the areas of the individual’s conscious and unconscious, which are divided and therefore marked differently by the imagination. Angeliki Siamou has kept the parameter of the personal element and has brought it back in a different way, having made significant changes. On the brink of denaturation. According to Georges Bataille, who was very popular in artistic circles in the 70s and 80s, symbols and myths had to be questioned as they form part of the dominant ideology of representation.
Siamou attempted this in the previous unit of her work. However, today her image is associated with the artistic practice of reformation. Her image consists of forms and concepts that are also encountered in the work of other artists; however, what makes this case special is the different approach to these forms and concepts, since they are clearly involved in the process of denaturation. Avoiding homogenous mechanisms that reproduce shallow, insipid forms and concepts (all these artistic fashions that come and go and are essentially the spectacle that has been incorporated into art), she distances herself from the sets and subsets exerting ideological control over the individual, and drafts private protocols for the creation of forms and concepts. Her image, rife with forms, is naturally secreted into the intangible world of the spirit of emotions and is united with its dialectical other in the version of the split individual. At the level of the medium was a solo gallery installation centering oral history as way of documenting ordinary Black life in the rural American South. Recorded phone conversations from my family in Prospect, VA were transferred to cassette tape, and invited guests to listen to the customary ways Black folks care for land, space, and people.
I think that certain keys are necessary in order to be able to see from the perspective that might be the most friendly or the most suitable, for the work of an artist who perseveres despite the adversity, for many years, in a very strict artistic space.
Initially I met Ms. Siamou painting a kind of relationship between herself and the vast world, a world that covers us all and in a way is a projection of various metaphysical/supernatural performances. It was a tremendously interesting work; very often geometry - correct reason, the importance of these things intruded her painting. The essence of the "correct" or "true word" - "orthos logos" despite appearances still follows her even now I have the impression.
When Ms. Siamou moved from Thessaloniki and went to a mountain which is surrounded by much mystery, much history, incredible charm - it is Mount Olympus - there her work took a decisive turn. The first and decisive step in her new transition was to turn - rather to distance herself quite a bit from a genre of painting that had become too inflated.
After the 90s, this kind of painting, that is, the rethinking of symbols, the deconstruction of symbols - the whole culture was going towards this negotiation, the cancellation/weakening of the meaning of symbols, of certain values, etc. I think that's where the most essential part of her work begins, the discovery, rather the reintroduction of an element that plagued many, many, many artists especially in the early 60s, who were swallowed up by the meat grinder of the American market. They were artists who emphasized an unformed emotional material that we all have, reminiscent of a fluid state of human emotion - there's too much Jung in here - this fluid state that they wanted to project directly.
This process Ms. Siamou adapted or, if you like, reinterpreted it in her own way, combined it with Greek thought - that's why I say the "orthos logos" - which we will see in her painting. That is to say, despite the fluid situation, there are structures that refer to a world that is almost visible, a world of unformedness which, through search, begins to project some familiar shapes. Here again a very interesting question arises.
What is her work? I have the feeling that the work has just been finished by Ms. Siamou, the final touch has been added, she is now weak in the face of its control, the work is shaped by me, the spectator. I am the one who will project, shape and create the new work, a work of my own, through the elements the artist offers me. And here again emerges the ancient Greek thought - the concept of tragedy - the Maenads, the myth of the god Pan who is cut into pieces and offered as "holy bread" to the faithful, this is the concept of tragedy.
I invite you to pay attention to her particular technique, it is a technique that can be mistaken as "simplistic" at first glance; I assure you that it is extremely laborious, it is much more difficult than the exact representation techniques se was tought at the University. Exact representation is the simplest thing today, it is very, very easy to be able to paint photographically. We don't need it. We need that shapelessness that I will shape as an individual.
ANGELIKI SIAMOU’S DREAMPORT AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE PROFANE
"We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola"
J.L. Godard
What is art? Our inner garments. The alibi for our nudity. Perhaps even our last chance at a revolution without messianic signs; a religion without metaphysics – but with the fear present – and like philosophy embodied in images and words. Art is a lie far more valuable than any other utilitarian truth and an experience as exclusive as death, which although experienced alone casts out any loneliness. Art is also that process which miraculously transforms addition to multiplication in order to satiate the 5000 with a few fish. However in this case satiation has nothing to do with plenitude, accumulation or the current superabundance of “goods”. Unhappiness lurks when the individual fails to become collective, no matter how loud the marketing sirens scream out their advertisements. The art of immediate consumption, which is influenced by market strategies and the lifestyle rationale, is what currently prevails on the global level and it is what I call coca-cola art. This is an art that goes with everything and aims at “phantasmagoria” instead of communion. Let us not forget that Phantasmagorie is the central concept in the critique of culture attempted by Walter Benjamin, following Marx who spoke of the fetishism of commodities, in other words an illusion and a substitute for a relationship. On the subject, Baudelaire sees art as the daydream that becomes a work, likening the artist to a hero of the modern time who will rid the urban class of its hysteria. Nowadays there is an excess of the melancholy of annulment, since artistic uniqueness is stifled or ingloriously exhausted in the dominant environment of fast-food aesthetics and “entertainment” at any price. Until the total eclipse of existence, on with the domination of the spectacle. Therefore, one understands that this art of which I speak can function as a form of resistance to the upcoming alienation and to the imposed uniformity mentioned above; in other words, to the joy of tedium. We, on the other hand, swear on a form of expression that knows no pundits, establishments or oppressors and considers all options to be open and legitimate; a form of expression that is political but not engaged, contemporary but not coercively “modern”, with a native conscience but not a local one. Lastly, a form of expression that wishes to exist within History when History – setting aside the communications fireworks and pyrotechnicians – starts to perform its work. This place has not seen a miracle in a very long time. The last unit of paintings by Angeliki Siamou dreamwalks between the untrodden paths at the bottom of the sea, the bowels of the sea and the transparent, ethereal plains in space; there where the image of the infinitesimal can be equated with an entire world or where the infinite nature of the universe can magically iridesce in a painting. Dreamlike and at the same time mythical – or rather the apologetic of the Myth –, the abstract landscape of Angeliki Siamou touches the invisible through the visible, and the magical through persistent as well as challenging invocations of hidden secrets and the secret abilities of matter. There are so many meanings in these explosions of colour, so many stories that are in no need of the typical narrative process. One needs only to want and to be able to see. In this case the painter’s phantasmagoria is completely well-founded.
Eighty years ago, Marina Tsvetaeva insisted that to be modern means to create in your time and not to reflect it. Today, the term “modern” seems more like a discount suit which, instead of making a statement, serves to hide a flaw. “What happens around me suddenly happens inside me” writes Cheimonas, in an effort to identify the suffering subject with any physical or unsubstantiated reality, past or future. We therefore create art in order to understand the qualities and to console ourselves in that which has passed, resisting the dominant market, which tends to render itself the author of a new “Art History” without any history and often without any art.
On the other hand, the concept of coca-cola art is spreading from music to film and from literature to the visual arts in the same way as fungi multiply throughout the planet. Globalisation at its peak! For this reason, Angeliki Siamou’s paintings express a kind of silent resistance in the way that they insist on defending the aesthetics of the sacred and not the consumptiveness of the profane, and in the way that they insist on not giving in to the extravaganza of size. After all, emotion is not a matter of money. What is a thrill? How can one describe it in words, wrote Karouzos. Some have built entire industries based on this thrill, which engage in the mass production of emotion. Resist!
Then again, if people knew how ridiculous and how pathetic the events that trigger great works are, they would be far more composed in the face of genius and more open to the small miracles happening around them every day. In the end, perhaps art is seeing what the masses cannot see, and paying the corresponding price for your isolation. Dumbfounded, institutions allow justice to be served by unjust means and allow TV-rats to wear public prosecutors’ robes. This society is drowning in its self-inflicted misery, paying for the crimes it has committed first and foremost against aesthetics. Notice the architecture which is disrespectful to this city, this country. Notice the suspense and uplifting of a vulgar eroticism that will never turn into love. Mourn the rotten piping of the quasi-modern and profane architecture, and let the materials themselves reveal the tragedy of this place, namely all that which the politicians and high priests of the profane have been hiding from you for years. Art is our last chance.
About angeliki siamou:
Angeliki Siamou attended Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, participated in group and solo exhibitions and projects worldwide.
Her work has been acquired by the National Museum of Contemporary Arts in Athens, Greece, the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, various private and public collections.
Colophon:
Project Development:
Aristotelis Fokas
This website does not track, store, or collect any data.
Angeliki Siamou's work ranges from:
· Paintings
· Mural Paintings
· Physical/Digital Installations
· Digital Media Projects
· Product design