Artwork

About Xilalatou

Images of memory and of observation create a stratigraphy of their own. When the curtain opens on the spectacle. It includes open seas, coves and riparian areas. The light develops relationships of its own between the water and the sky, in the reflections which flicker across the waves and in the tints allowed by the late afternoon or the sunset to fade into lightfooted shadows. Harbours large and small open up their coloured embrace, balancing sails of different shapes - since the subject taken by Iris Xilas Xanalatos is directly bound up both with the process of negotiating form and with the conceptual content of that form on each occasion, extending as it does into symbols and allegories. By avoiding everything superfluous and focusing on the substantive, this printer presents - after a series of elided abstractions - the forms which are the sails of boats crossing the water, reminding us of the wings of birds or semi-transparent groupings which transmute the thematic starting-point from which she sets out. Each level of structural composition infiltrates into the next, as part of an interlocking process of interpenetration. The viewer feel as if he were penetrating the shell of image, which is revealed to him in its dialectical planes of colour combinations and schematic transformations. As each screen interpolates itself into the next, the image is dissected horizontally and vertically, without losing any of its cohesion. the figures seem recognisable at the very moment that they are discarding their realism. The dynamics of the ebb and the flow of colour is constructed out of the arrangement of each different level - in which the next level is apparent - while the tones are graded so that their association amits, as they stand adjacent or justaposed to one another, a subterranean luminosity. In the works of Iris Xilas Xanalatos, the motifs fuction towards one another with restrained lyricism, inner vibrancy and doric simplicity, as if they were the vowels and consonants of a secret phrase lurking, almost musically, beneath the meanings of the image, metaphorically expanding the significances in the voyages and itineraries of the eye. Working on the borderline between reality and myth, between the daydream and the elegy, between "the lightness of being" and the uplift of dreams, this printer uses her mixed technique to convey that which is transient as firm and that which is an ancident as a paradox of the probable. A tail wind swells the sails, which lend colour to the sea voyages and the warmth of the brine. through these works, phototropic wetlands with their translucent osmosis of brilliance, polyonymous sparks of life and puffs of breeze stand as reminders of the challenges to be bold, to walk the tightrope, concealed in everyday life; that is the source from which springs the poeticality of the ephemeral.

Athina Schina