The quiet world of plants and the secret life emerging from within their foliage, the warm presence of an orange or fig tree bearing fruit, the friendly, gentle light filtering through the lacy branches and leaves, and the often invisible presence of insects living and breathing around us, is the subject matter of Evanthia Soutoglou’s recent work. Her themes are familiar and intimate: the view from our window, our city, the parks with their dense foliage, the courtyard of some forgotten neoclassical house with its circular iron staircase and neglected garden. In this world, so quotidian as to be misconstrued, Soutoglou pursues a not so visible reality. She seeks the mystical workings of nature; she tries to approach its cryptic machinery, which we’ve all hastened to take for granted and ceased all observation and investigation. The painter expends herself on profound quests for the great and important; she isn’t lured by the sirens of modernism. She reaches out her hands and eyes into the dimension of the scorned and ignored components of our world and, with adept, assured painting, guides us on her exploration.

Soutoglou presents a nature slowly being entrenched and threatened by the works of mankind. She offers us a green world, a hospitable refuge for every species of creature, great and small, conversing and surviving with it: the trees and foliage of our gardens and parks, whose imperceptible nods and whispers keep telling us so much that we stubbornly refuse to accept and apply. In these paintings, the artist accentuates this ‘other side’ of our everyday world; she explores the self-evident and the given elements and the paradoxes it contains, and leaves us with the choice of accepting or rejecting them.

Christos Konstantopoulos

* From the magazine “Art International”, issue 39, May-June-July 1998.