Christina Papaioannou
Christina Papaioannou is a young upcoming painter from Thessaloniki, Greece. She has an Integrated Master’s degree from Athens School of Fine Arts, graduating from Triantafyllos Partaskidis’s and George Harvalias’s painting studio in 2014. Her work is in private collections and has been exhibited across Greece, Cyprus and in London. In 2019 she won the MATAROA prize for upcoming artists at 4th Art Thessaloniki International Contemporary Art Fair. In 2017 her work was published in International ArtMaze Magazine, Late Summer Issue #4. She collaborates with Ikastikos Kiklos Sianti Gallery, Athens.
EXHIBITIONS
in collaboration with Lola Nikolaou Gallery, Municipal Art Gallery of Malevizi, Crete
“In essence, the poet has one theme: his living body”
George Seferis, poet
In Papaioannou’s work, we can distinguish the deconstruction of the bodies and forms: decollage – fragmentation – detachment – intersection – displacement = scarification, movement – time, dissolution, flow and re-synthesis. The visual surface is transformed into a kind of atlas where each snapshot can be read as an independent narrative, while being part of an integrated structure. We are at the perimeter and at the centre at the same time. The contrasting colours, sometimes intense and conflicting, and sometimes soft and pastel, with the dew and freshness of a modern perception in ideas of painting, transmits a musical air that rightfully belongs to the future, since painting is not over and will never end. As D. Dimitriadis says: “Anything that seeks its end can only find it where it is lost. In its beginning.”
Man’s inability to find identity in his primitive states drives the resulting impotence to discover truths within hidden meanings. And so a shattered cosmic collage emerges where the human existence plays in the deconstructed form of fractured bodies, in which tragically, the inability to discover the coexisting bodies of his deep primal soul and present emerging actuality emerges.
Paradoxically, the captive narratives and the boundless renderings are juxtaposed in an ability to reinforce defined boundaries as well as openness in creative activity, as they grant the ability to create new texts constantly. An inexhaustible wealth of playful scenarios are emergent: the “Object of the Imagination,” the “Unlimited”.
In the end, the work of Christina Papaioannou can be assessed as an active stage where the body and the spirit converge and diverge, the external and internal world, love – loneliness, emphatically emphasising the animosity of life and the poetry of painting, as a cathartic value against this agony.
Curated by Efthimis Lazongas (Sorbonne University –Paris I –Pantheon, History of Art Professor at ASFA, Master’s in Visual Arts).