Illegalities

Gallery Tint

Eleni Theofilaktou exhibits at TinT gallery’s projectroom a drawing installation entitled “Illegalities”. The installation owes its genesis to the artist’s obsessive preoccupation with the poetry of Kiki Dimoula.

“The texture of many things I have modified as would suit to be a poem in the future” Kiki Dimoula has said.

Creating the installation of drawings with her poems as a starting point, but having as a vital path “wrongdoing” in particular,

I later understood, that I modified the texture of many poems as would suit to be an “article” in the future. Meaning to be realized visually, the “illegalities” becomes the laws,
rules of independence which make a game of “must – must not”,
winning or losing creatively.

The designs are not delivered like an ironed suit, but as a dive into the minefield – per say – of the illegal acts of writing or as a carrier of questions.

Eleni Theofilaktou graduated from the Drama School of R. Pateraki in 1985 and the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1991.
She completed her post-graduate studies in painting and visual art theories at the University of East London (2001-02). She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad.Her works are to be found in private and public collections, including the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the State Museum of Thessaloniki and other.

Where can a human be found?
In the open or closed areas of consciousness?
Where are the prophetic alignments of history read?

Who determines the boundaries and time of this parallel universe, which is none other than the inexplicable “behavior,” where our self”behaves”
-free and beautiful from its fixed wrapper?
And if Art has to choose a script to deal with it, what will it be?
A bold artist who reads a poem, selects the elliptical spiral writing. Not exactly non-representational or clear; within the boundaries of illegality, once confined and once free.
Helen Theofilaktou creates deformed landscapes of ambiguity, distrust and grief.
You can be afraid if you deal with it: a vast field of known-unknown proportions.
The conscious and the unconscious. Sooner or later you question yourself: How deep can you go?
Helen proves herself to be bold when it comes to the use of material and medium. She maps entire regions rather than small intervals.
The elliptical forms are perfectly able to define a field, to allow to paranomies (illegalities) to become obvious, to bring to light aspects of the unconscious, hidden just behind the tongue or should we say behind the door?
Her painting is brave and conscious.
Brave as a poem.

Dr. Zoe Chatzistavrou,
Historian-Curator.