Katerina Kokkinaki
Solo Exhibition by Katerina Kokkinaki
Real though unnatural, gorgeous and dreamlike, revealing yet expressionless, ordinary but at the same time extremely aloof, the women in the works by Katerina Kokikinaki are sitting pretty caught in the vortex of predefined rules of a simulated beauty. The artist intentionally chose to portray specific personas, who are actual beauty icons, using well calculated stylizations –“the girls are real life fashion models, like Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, Natalia Vodianova”- thus demonstrating with her representations that artificial beauty standards can transform a real face into a façade.
Her attractive female figures with their captivating stares, artfully depicted with great energy and plasticity of form, seem to hide behind their striking looks, enveloped in an imposing background with an abundance of flowing colors and wrapped in an atmosphere of “sweet melancholy”. Hence, the artist urges the viewer to discover the various overtones concealed under the prevailing ideals of beauty, such as, how fragile and short-lived the idea of beauty in the era of the “image” and the “pretend” is; moreover, she suggests that the continuous pressure to fit into the accepted idea of a wonderful fake world can be the cause for major strain and even feelings of impasse.
Kokkinaki’s compositions, despite their harmony of colors and their general pleasantness, produce a rather eerie sensation. Everything is immersed in an endless silence and gives off a stillness that chills the air, making the melancholy ambience ever more present. Her forms are two dimensional, making the paintings seem even more dreamlike; there is no use of perspective, everything is flat and static, much like images from an imaginary, unreal world, one which exists only within the realm of dreams and memories.
The artist’s works are filled with impressive human figures that seduce the viewer with their pleasant looks, leaving nevertheless the bitter aftertaste of a subtle emptiness. In fact, Kokkinaki uses her externally “sweet” iconography to create the impression of emptiness, of absence: “The same figure is interchanging constantly and remains autistically alone… she feels the need to oblige, yet strongly refuses to, tightly constrained within her own peculiarity. Ultimately, has she always been alone, or was her loneliness dictated by circumstance?”
Kokkinaki’s themes, which revolve entirely around the human form, focus mainly on the depiction of the face of the person portrayed, while the rest of the body has a complementary role in the painting and is not rendered realistically. Clothes, though significant in the reality of these particular women, since they are fashion models, are merely suggested in the paintings and serve no specific purpose. The accurately depicted, emblematic symbolic images, on the other hand, that seem inserted arbitrarily into the portraits, such as birds, animals, flowers, or even inanimate objects (ice-skates, toys, etc,) contribute greatly to the narrative; they correspond to memories recorded deeply into the artist’s subconscious and emerge deliberately in her paintings thereby enhancing the mystifying atmosphere of her compositions.
The mysterious world in Kokkinaki’s series of works titled “Sweet Melancholy” with the attractive, yet bizarre, images and their profound semantic interpretation, as well as their more or less clear conceptual references, makes up for a solid body of pioneering works of excellent quality. The artist, unrestricted by the classic rules of representation, has managed to express herself exceptionally and with an inspired artistic zest, as manifested by her skillful color schemes, the masterful highlight and contouring techniques, her meticulous handling of every detail and the plasticity in the arrangement of her painting surfaces. Her work integrates her artistic identity in an iconographic interplay between natural and unnatural, real and imaginary, material image and intangible sentiment, truth and falsehood, optimism and pessimism.
“The idea of ’Sweet Melancholy’, my last series of portraits, came to me as I walked out of a movie theater on evening, after having watched Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia”. These women, I said to my partner then, look so much like mine, and he just nodded and kind of smiled, as if he already knew something that I didn’t. Few years later, I would experience feelings of absolute melancholy due to his loss. Thus ends a painting cycle of almost 6 years and sets off the anticipation of a new day; taking things to the next level, that of the complete and utter freedom, when my minute evanescence on earth is a fact.”
Louisa Karapidaki
Art Historian
