Photini Stephanidi begins her painting from the journeys of a gaze that surveys and illuminates, that delves deeper and internalises the “small and great world” of everyday life, of experiences, of memories, of expectations, of dreams, the world of the ephemeral yet defining, along with the other world, that of desires and the enlargement of the momentary, as it is captured by and springs up from the subconscious. In the visual reconstruction of all those ‘groups’ that make up her own ‘environments’, what comes first is the poetic way in which she puts them together, associatively, conveying the after-sensations of what is, ultimately, a polynomial reality. Her colours, earthly and joyful, transfuse a nostalgic and dreamy mood that nurtures and, simultaneously, dilates the insignificant details, which take on a semantic range, conquering, in her painting, their unprecedented value. In an abstract way, or, at other times, combining the recognisable elements of a more realistic language, Photini Stephanidi paints in the way that a sensitive receiver would keep notes in a journal. In her work, nature becomes human experience and, conversely, human experience becomes a synaesthetically vibrating ‘landscape’ that contains conflated times, places, rhythms, seasons, qualities, flavours, scents and sounds, which evoke musical natural frequencies. In essence, the painter depicts, through her psychic oscilloscope, realities, fictions and transcendences that negate decay and banish oblivion, bridging the gap between past and present, the contracted and the uncontracted, and the questions of life with its exclamation marks.

Athena Schina
Art Critic and Historian

* From the group exhibition catalogue “Ploes XXI: Nepenthe and Eothina”, Petros and Marika Kydoniefs Foundation, Andros, 2015.