The suggestive painting of Gefso Papadaki

Gefso Papadaki's disciplined and reflective painting portrays her effort to feel the unconditional limits of her own personal freedom. She experiments on the canvas surface by controlling her colour and subject matter through which she elaborates on concepts defining human relations: containment, responsibility, trust, loneliness-companionship, introversion-communication, memory-oblivion. Her compositions are static, compact, touching upon objectivity, however, they are also close to the suggestive arbitrary process of poetic interpretation. The visual world that surrounds her, still life objects, landscapes, interior spaces, lose their value in the artist's daily life. These objects, without strong descriptive elements and only with the use of colour as the predominant factor of expression, are abstractly transliterated into small poetic images of emotions and impressions that they can thus be known and shared with the viewers.
The way she organises her visual vocabulary on her painting surface with simple, bald descriptions, where her shapes develop harmoniously and the colour defines the poetic tension of the image, bring her either close to Lyrical Abstraction or to Abstract Expressionism.
In the first case, colour has only two dimensions, the objects are shaped and their forms are rendered with simple thick lines in order to enlarge and stretch them on the composition. Yet, when she uses colour in thick layers so as to create memory images and night landscapes where the presence of the tree dominates, then she touches on the areas of Abstract Expressionism.
Lyrical Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism are both artistic movements of contemporary Art History that have given us a method, a tenet to use in order to interpret the inner conflicts of an artist. However familiar people are today with the images of modern technology, as far as the artistic gestural expression is concerned, they will still be immensely impressed by the immediacy of the interaction and the sensitivity of artistic idiosyncrasy.

Dr Giannis Kolokotronis
Assistant Professor of History of Art
Democritus University of Trace. Department of Architecture.