By Konstantinos Stoupathis, Museologist/Art Conservator, Athens, 15/9/20
Colored surfaces that structure a semantic frame with indefinite content onto canvas. Squares, quadrilaterals and interrelated shapes which form images of a multifaceted reality: a visual alternative to the world. From the “indefinite” to the “concrete”, from the “focused” to the “unfocused” from the “individual” to the “collective”.
Various aspects of the recent artworks of Kleopatra Moursela, visual artist with a special viewing obsession, towards a painting -direction with various engagements, references to primitive theorems but also technological achievements.
Paintings consisting of small but colorful units. Dynamic forms that “float”, coexist, interact with each other, like the bricks of a wall that build an architecture, a whole and a way-out. The viewer seeks to find semantic reasoning and outcomes: they all make up, a cosmic patchwork in an attempt to speak of another aspect of reality-an obsessive or compulsive direction. Dynamic rectangles that refer to solid algebraic and mathematical equations, pieces of a textile or carpet that grow symmetrically or heterogeneously into space. As fragments of a folklore artifact that consist of optical squares of the same reality, symbols of the subconscious.
If you remove one they may all collapse! The same goes for the color relationships of her paintings. A natural or an artificial dialogue of color intensity, a painted whole made of pure pigments. A suggestion to travel from the natural environment to the pixels of the digital world. Each shape can be thought of as an autonomous unit with separate dynamics, color intensity, passive or energetic form, relationship and interaction with the viewer’s eye. But all these pieces, when viewed as a group, are subject to a dialogue in order to raise life-concerns.
Under all this interpretation, the viewer shall wonder whether her art is a combination of the traditional elements or an engagement with the digital image. Fibers and knits of an (imaginary) woven or a digital mosaic, the one that glorifies tradition and informatics altogether. Subject to the academicism of the traditional painting practices with harmonious ensembles, vertical sections, strict angles, warm squares linked to dark quadrilaterals. Structured compositions like decorative patterns and motifs that sometimes lead from the “knitted” to the “structured” shot of a blurred photo. From the “balanced” to the “opposite”, from the “convergent” to the “divergent” of the core of the human eye of the viewer, from “today to the exit”, to the solution of the problem that arised.
Her paintings, a thought that you have vaguely focused your eyes on, a deep immersion and vice-versa. To focus on a redemptive effort. To find yourself, to structure your thinking to make up your mind.
Focus or non Focus? Towards an in-depth, painting immersion.