Art consultant Nikos Stathoulis tells us about the painter Athanasia Giaxidou, who was born and raised in the Netherlands but now lives and “works” in Athens:
Athanasia is a remarkable artist, because with her brush she tries to give form to concepts that are incomprehensible and mysterious, even within absolute Light.
Concepts that, in the minds and hands of many, have become conventional over a lifetime take on flesh and bone in this artist’s work.
She is a singular case among artists: her work rests on a system of discoveries which, through the way they function, architecturally balance the edifice of her philosophical creed.
Her ideas are the concerns of all of us. Our doubts. Our questions about the origin of the world… of our very being. Whatever the imagination can conceive along our personal orbit on this planet, Athanasia’s work renders at times pictorially and at times descriptively, without relying on abstract shapes that leave the viewer to guess at meaning on her behalf.
I would say that with this cosmogonic subject matter the artist sets out to strike almost a blow against the exclusive hold that science and religion have on this inheritance.
Does she succeed? In part, yes… because she turns to sources that are familiar to us and that bring to the fore models which have been naturalised for centuries in our collective subconscious. Her themes are archetypal and primeval. They are fragments of memory and of our distant past. Her work is dramatically autobiographical. It provokes questions. They seem to come out of chaos, yet they carry a strange inner order.
This is the cry of an artist who, in the rest of her life, knows how to keep silent. Her works are in motion. They have no single direction of view. Her colours vibrate in their lavish use. Her painting allows her to relive her fears and to give them life.
If art is a guarantee of mental health, then the path is a painful one. For it is dramatically bound up with the relationship of another life that is played out within this one… This is the incomprehensible question the artist poses on this deeply personal journey.
The human presence gives substance to the chaos of time, of our view of the world and of our imagination.
Text: Nikos Stathoulis – Art Consultant
