Maria Parianou presents her solo exhibition opening on Thursday February 27th at 19:00 at a.antonopoulou.art gallery.

Cloudy sky, stately monuments, plurality of buildings, smaller humble houses, one overlaying the other, constraining railings, aqueducts, bridges that don’t connect, a window shuttered. Enclosure-Kafkaesque atmosphere?

Suffocating cities, merely gloomy, designed meticulously, obsessively; cities that are spread reaching the margins of the canvas, almost breaking them, yet never decisive about it.

Cities that are sailing through time, still saturated by the moisture of the Middle Ages, heavily carrying the vanity of the following centuries but yet in quest of beauty and caring for their dwellers; cities that are either garnished architecturally or unsightly, cities that are peaceful and dreary, inhospitable or almost dead; others that are full of tension and insanity; cities covered in concrete, with glass surfaced buildings reflecting the opposite facet. Interlocutor or a dead end? Perhaps an objective with a potential interaction with the dead end.

Maria Parianou, on the course of her work, is tracking consistently, constantly and gradually on the interpretation of the fragmented man of our era and is documenting the phenomena. The sink in the microcosm and the urge of human to hyperanalysis, the descent, from the general to the specific, from the order to the chaos, the disintegration of the continuum, that loses its initial substance and potential of being a whole.

The information is confined within its own pursuit. The truth will never be whole.

And what about Ariadne? Where is Ariadne to guide us with her thread through the dark labyrinths to a redemptive way out?

The painter, acquainted with the adventure of the concept and emotions in art, encourages us, in a reserved manner, to breath and hope, on those points where the surface of the canvas is more vibrant, ignoring the foregone, leaning, in sympathy, over great tasks and issues and the personal stories of the people, equilibrating between the infinite and the minimum, the grand and the conventional, between science and poetry.

The challenge to manage to co-exist, over the stretched grid of the city.

Text by Teta Makri, Emeritus Professor of the School of Fine Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Μaria Parianou was born in 1976 in Thessaloniki. She graduated from School of Visual and Applied Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Aristotle Univerisity of Thessaloniki. She lives and works in Thessaloniki.