Mertzani’ s iconography is clear and concise, yet complex. Her images vacillate between attraction and repulsion, the aesthetically appealing and anti-aesthetic. She has managed to create an imaginative landscape of fortuitous pictorial happenings which are impregnated with significance yet open to personal interpretation.

For example, if her work prompts speculations about the ailing human condition, it also offers the possibility of individual meditation. Her imagery is effective precisely because it has the capacity to yield a multitude of different responses and because it permits the viewer to instinctively establish a pattern of association depending on their own predicament. With intelligence and insight, Mertzani skillfully guides her audience and preconditions its mood, but not its response.

Part of the appeal in her work also lies in the fact that the artist avoids being judgmental or adopting a moralizing tone, taking instead a critical but at the same time sympathetic look towards the seemingly meaningless objects that surround and characterize us. At the same time Mertzani deals with a reality that is harsh and uncomfortable, around which she literally weaves a web of consolation in an attempt (for the artist) to be “able to find a temporary harmony in his state of malaise”. Above all she has created a body of work which is arresting for its restrained mood and meditative atmosphere. She communicates her vision with subtlety, never lapsing into sentimentality, leaving the viewer an open-ended channel of communication.

Katerina Gregos 
Art Historian – Museologist

* From the catalogue of Katerina Mertzani’s exhibition, AD Gallery, Athens, 1997.