Anabasis: On the Paintings of Eleni Gkinosati

Its been said that painting is like going to battle, one has to have a strategy to get into place the right circumstances for victory. The great problem of how to enable the universal archetypes to act directly upon the plane of the particular is the challenge that must be solved in the doing. For, advancement and attainment in painting can only be wrought forth through the finer undercurrents. And its what you don’t see as much as what you do see that impacts. Form is primary, or rather the way in which an artist uses space within a given set of parameters. The stretched canvas formatted vertically or horizonatally and its sizing determines the initial approach to the blank space. A moment of pause, to consider the first wave of movement, then, the impulse to make the first gestural approach into the vast depths of the unseen.

The bombs that go off in Eleni Gkinosati’s mind are the buliding blocks of constructive improvisations gathering steam and force. The volume of power she draws forth using a wet mix of oil and water, are the actions of her endless capacity to formulate, and most importantly, to control a given set of problems, and thereafter, solving them. Gkinosati innately employs this connectivity between her conscious actions and directs the subconscious impulses. One can say that where there is smoke, there is fire in her rapid bursts of movement. At the same time there is a controlled demoltion of the free form accumulations whereby they negate themselves even as she builds them up. This engenders an expressive outcome on the heels of their psychic driving. For in abstract expressionism, to make a topological impression is not enough in-of-itself. There must be velocity, and it’s such velocity that gives Gkinosati’s paintings the uncanny sheen of the intangible.

The truth of the matter is that a sea of mentalism is entwined in these ectoplasmic structures. Working in large-scale formats, she rides the painter’s wave as it rushes through her mind, absorbed through her own body, translated into all encompassing sensorial images. Anthropomorphic torsos and faces appear and disappear from work-to-work in a total fluid immersion of paint. The subconcious takes over.

Jean Dubuffet said that art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, and an instrument of communication; that, there is no art without mad intoxication and the highest degree of delirium. One can recognize such delirium in Gkinosati’s controlled demolitions and dense puzzles. Gkinosati herself has commented that she is pursuing a moment of climax (from the Greek word corifosis) in a sequence of absolute expressive perfection.

Consequently, her paintings are skeins of colour teetering back and forth between a reduced palette of one or two colors such as ultramarines that merge into cobalt blues, or molecular implosions of cadmium reds with skeins of plum seeping into and out of each other. Contrasts of hot and cold are intuitvely employed using icy turquoise combined with emphatic bursts of chroma yellow. And when employed, the bluntness of sticky black encrustatons gives them a point blank impact. This creates vortexes of space, as pockets of tornado colors moving in the air until landing, then settling onto the raw, unprimed jute.

Gkinosati’s paintings are spatial arrangments of tempestuous colours and form; they’re brash and coy, seductive, and demonstrative. They register her spontaneous combustions while their industrial physicality grabs your attention. Such emphatic paintings don’t tread lightly on the eye; rather, they assault the senses. Delirium has its virtue. Its drives them, it powers them. An emotive beatific delirium where the modernist grid is detonated like dynamite in a quarry, leaving behind craters, and sparkling heaps of accumulated impasto. They’re too real to be mere wallflowers, for Gkinosati is aligned with the tenets of classic American abstract expressionism. She revels in the nature of paints ability to orginate forms endlessly, and deliberates her own playful way with it. Her palette is lunar, visceral, and potent. It is present. In their spatial gyration lies industrial toughness, PUNKT as Joe Bradley; meaning a matterof-fact attitude towards painting itself, as primal as cave painting. For Gkinosat’s painting sytle is assured, balletic, and precise. With Dionysian ecstasy tempered by Apollonian coolness, she updates abstraction with all of its 21st century implications. Through the painting deity itself she plays the Orphic scales of colour and form in a progression of repetition that leads to daring compositions. With wild abandon Gkinosati seizes, then tempers, lassoing striations of color, bolts of lightening fast gestures, sweeping patches of run-off, and incidental drips. The accumulation of paint is akin to soil erosion, or volcanic eruptions where the topography craters into new combinations.

With its attendant geometries and personal quirks, a painting does reveal itself when hanging. Hence the bulit-in rules of abstraction take to task anthropomorphism, taking it to the extreme limits of dissolution. And that is where the virtues of painting are found. Figuration takes on the abstraction of bodily sense memory, like a photographic time-lapse of motion itself. What you see in the outcome of her rhythmic forms and pugnacious sgraffito marks are as uninhibited as children’s drawing. Thus, the anabasis of Eleni Gkinosati is a metaphor on that process. She knows that to make art is to go to war with complacency. It’s a progression from an external world of representational symbols, towards a culmination of interior sensations. It is therefore not only life, but also intelligence, and life guided by intelligence becomes volition. And in that continuum, lies the substance of an unfettered locus riding the silent wings of the muses.

Max Henry