The
Dreamscapes of Foteini Palpana
Seurat observes the sea. Cézanne, the mountain. The
two painters observe the natural landscape actively, participatorily. They
stand before it with a disposition of redefinition and they render it in a
novel way, thus renewing the genre of landscape painting. Approaching painting
with scientific criteria, they fundamentally change art, as well as how we see
and interpret it. Their work undoubtedly constitutes a "paradigm shift."
In the summer of 1885, in western Normandy where he was vacationing,
Seurat made a study for the painting Le Bec du Hoc (Grandcamp). The
depicted rock, divided between light and shadow, is a bridge that connects the
land, the sea, and the sky. Its pointed tip slightly – though decisively – cuts
the horizon line, raising our gaze towards the sky and the five seabirds, which
give the vista an imperceptible dramatic intensity. Six decades later, at the
height of World War II, these birds transform into Allied bombers that would
level the Normandy coastline, radically changing the appearance of the
landscape. The rock that Seurat praised still exists today, but it is almost
unrecognizable, wounded, incomplete, a victim of humanity's destructive mania.
The model of a great painter was destined to become the informal monument of a
great war.
Art historian Michelle Foa, who
has deeply studied Seurat, argues that this particular painting and those
belonging to the same series are works of a painter who is aware of the
representational limitations and of the possibilities of his art[1].
Seurat shows us what painting –a painted landscape– can do and at the same time
what it cannot do. Similarly, as a genuine descendant of this perception,
Foteini Palpana seems to have a good understanding of the limits of
painting and sculptural representation of a space or place. Her
latest paintings, made with oil pastel on synthetic fabrics, are created with
controlled spontaneity. As she says, they contain (her) thought and at the same
time they reproduce it. They constitute, therefore, preeminently reflective
images. They possess the depth, weight, and impulsiveness of thought, as well
as the lightness of a reflection, its sudden, lightning appearance, its
fleeting path, its flash. These images are the same size, soft—due to the pile
of the fabric—and abstract, without of course lacking representational traces.
They are usually presented in a grid, with a small distance between them, as
this highlights in a better way the patterns of thought and the elective
affinities, the relationships between the images. Seen all together, they
resemble a mural that combines the rational and the expressionistic, the
Apollonian and the Dionysian. These images possess musicality, a rhythmology.
Within this grid, you can identify condensed times, interacting moments and
mental states.
Palpana's painted images possess
autonomy, clarity. One is tempted to "read" them in the same way that
Carol Armstrong examines Cézanne's still life watercolours in an archaeological
manner. The art historian carries out an excavation with the eyes (digging
with our eyes into the artist’s working process), as if the painting
surface were the ground[2].
Her "excavation" brings to light the artist's thoughts behind her
gestures: hesitations, changes of mind, subtle vibrations in the trajectory of pigment
matter, in the rendering of shapes and colours. Just as Cézanne's watercolours
are a mixture of drawing and painting, so Palpana's fabric images combine
painting with drawing and sculpture. And most importantly: they are
thought-images that spring from the body, from the artist's gut.
"I had so much painting in me..." she thinks as she produces these
images – a phrase that may well be reformulated as a question
to herself: "Did I really have so much painting in my body and didn't know
it?"
Palpana uses a metaphorical scheme to describe her painted images and,
by extension, the way she works: "I invent a vocabulary, not with the aim
of communicating a message, but with the joy of articulating sounds, of
reproducing phonemes, of an endless game of variations on syllables and their
combinations, up to the invention of words and families of derivatives,
compounds, homophones..." In other words, the artist works like a poet,
without a recipe, without knowing the outcome beforehand. "One word brings
out another word, and the next brings out another, and in the end the poem
comes out," says Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke[3].
Palpana's works seem to emerge in a similar way, like a poetic text, like words
that are born from the traces and the sound of previous words. Indicatively,
the "Soft Sculptures" she created in the period 2022-24 prepared the
ground for her painting. This series, as well as the installation Islands
grow – Islands fluctuate (2022), consists of "sculptural
drawings" sewn onto synthetic fabric. Unlike Claes Oldenburg's soft
sculptures, Palpana's works do not reproduce the commonplace, such as food and
everyday objects. With a limited colour palette (grey, blue, black, green) and
a strict appearance, the relief "drawings" allude to wild rocks. Here
too there is play, as in Oldenburg, but it mostly concerns the construction
process.
Some of her "Soft Sculptures" bear the remnants of dust from
the processing of other sculptures. The trace of contact between the works thus
becomes another material. In the studio space, the works coexist, not always
harmoniously: sometimes they are squeezed together, touching each other (accidentally)
– why erase a caress, the trace of a random, or fateful, encounter? The contact
of the constructed work with the artist's body is of equal importance. In the
eight-minute video View of me (2017), Palpana presents in the most emphatic
way her symbiotic relationship with a rock she has created herself. The white rock is gradually revealed from the
darkness of the projection and then disappears from our sight just as it
appeared. The artist, like another Sisyphus, carries the large stone on her
belly and breathes with it. It is not a burden to her; we must imagine her happy[4].
Body and stone become work, composing a landscape that is constantly changing. View
of me reveals not only one aspect of Palpana, an inner thought of hers, the
way she perceives the production and presentation of a work: it also indirectly
comments on the position of the viewer, on the contemplation, and the time we
spend fleetingly in front of a landscape.
Beyond the concept of coexistence, empathy also helps us understand
Palpana's relationship with her works and how she attempts to map such a
relationship. In the video Alien, domestic & underneath (2020), we
see her walking barefoot on the installation My dream landscapes call for
electric arms (2020-21), which is still under construction, before the next
layers of coloured matter are added and it is divided into six pieces, which
will be placed on low foam bases. Her repeated dreamwalk is hypnotic and invites
you to interpret it (dreamwork). When the six otherworldly islands finally
become dreamscapes and are placed on the mosaic floor of Talc Studio, they bear
on and within them the imprints of the artist's body as well as a series of
mnemonic traces, which act subterraneously, like the subtle vibrations in
Cézanne's watercolours: undoubtedly, these sculptural islands are lived, they
are another facet of herself. Similarly, in the installation Islands on my
mind grow on my back (2021), as the title suggests, the artist directly
connects the landscape and geological transformations with her body. This time,
however, the colourful islands (in blue, orange, white, pink, and green) are
visibly more solid, part of the mind and not so much of the dream – they belong
or want to belong to the universe of consciousness.
From 2010 to the present, Palpana's works are characterized by gestures
that indicate the need to tame the landscape and by the desire to understand
its poetic power. There are works where the artist folds the sea with her
hands, she digitally deconstructs rocks, sets up installations with landscape-writings,
reconstructs a shipwreck, inhabits a remote island, in an attempt to
familiarize herself with the inaccessible and to map the unknown. "The
relief of the ground and the rock always as a pretext for form," she
herself writes about her new paintings, thus practicing empathy, entering the
mind – the shoes – of Georges Seurat. The rocks and the geological background
of Syros, the island where she spent her early years, hold a special place in
her work, in this exploration of the earth's secrets, in this persistent search
for physicality, for the dialectical relationship between body and landscape.
Already from her thesis at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2012, where she
presented a body of work based on the shipwreck of the steamship Patris (sunk
in 1868 off the coast of Kea, en route from Piraeus to Syros), she laid the
foundations for an artistic exploration with philosophical extensions and
contemporary existential references. "Shipwreck, as seen by a survivor, is
the figure of an initial philosophical experience," writes Hans Blumenberg
in Shipwreck with Spectator (1979)[5].
Perhaps this primal experience was also sought by the then young artist with
this particular work.
"The body is for bringing out thoughts,"[6]
wrote the poet, but Foteini Palpana's body, this constant field, is
attuned to also bring out painting and sculpture, art that has the rare ability
to bring out thoughts from your own body as well.
Christoforos
Marinos
Art historian
and curator
[1] Michelle Foa, Georges
Seurat: The Art of Vision, Yale University Press, New Haven and London,
2015, p. 13.
[2] Carol Armstrong, Cézanne in
the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles, 2004, p. 103.
[3] «Η μία λέξη βγάζει άλλη μία λέξη και η επόμενη βγάζει
άλλη, και στο τέλος βγαίνει το ποίημα», Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke: «Το μεγαλύτερό μου όνειρο είναι να μην απελπίζομαι»,
Interview with Giorgos Douatzis, Fractal, May 2009. https://www.fractalart.gr/katerina-aggelaki-rouk-interview/ The extract is
translated by the writer.
[4] "One must
imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus concludes in his essay The Myth of
Sisyphus. See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays,
trans. Justin O’Brien, Vintage Books, New York, 1991, p. 124.
[5] Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck
with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall,
The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 12.
[6] Chrysa Alexopoulou, «Σώμα, το
σταθερό πεδίο», Χάρτης, iss. 38, February 2022 (special issue: Katerina
Anghelaki-Rooke). https://www.hartismag.gr/hartis-38/afierwma/swma-to-stathero-pedio"
