You Look Wonderful

Tonight, for the time being put the entire blame on the perfidious kiss delivered by Nostalgia¹

Lina Tsikouta

Art Historian – Curator at the National Gallery

”Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two. A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric. A canvas is never empty.”

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Between the lines by Kiki Dimoula and the quote from Robert Rauschenberg lies the thread connecting the new works by Marigo Kassi. Another title could have been: “Materiality, Feeling, Nostalgia, Remembrance”. The works the painter is presenting belong to three entities, which are all reciprocally complementary, adding new elements to one another. They all work with more or less the same subject matter and their execution is also similar.

Through her systematic involvement with nature in her previous exhibitions with the rendering of interior spaces, in combination with the human figure we observe a perpetual movement from the abstract to the non-figurative and from the informel to the figurative. A common concern of hers in all these is the texture, the feeling and the materiality of the painting, taken together with the materials she incorporates. Her visual angle consists of the fragmentary, the close-at-hand, and the familiar.

In her new work the subject matter bears the “aroma” of the female “essence”, as it were. We have become accustomed to saving that a woman’s creativity is no different than a man’s. In this case, however, these are the works that speak of the woman, and are most likely directed to women. They are like whispers, light female conversation, confessional, immediate, sincere and soothing. The organization of the compositions is done by layered system of horizontal and vertical axes, which assist the narrative ness, and the presentation of the veiled allusions.

The little skirt and the pumps are painted with dry pastels and pencil on graph paper, while the shadows of the little girls are executed in spray. The metal grater, the large wooden spoon or the little porcelain heads are added to the work’s iconographic repertoire. In the second entity, using wallpaper or handmade as a base, the previous iconographic motifs are arranged in various combinations. Finally, a third entity presents, in a variety of stances, the calves of young women wearing pumps and an endless combination of feet in shoes arranged on various hierarchic levels of the layers of the compositions. The colors employed in these works are at times quite explosive while other times the tints are soft and faint, like a recollection of the objects or conditions that they are depicting.

The works bear within themselves something of the design immediacy of the motifs and the repetitions of everyday objects found in Pop Art. The stamped, printed figures of the little girls, despite their disarming innocence, bring to mind the fingerprints from “Anthropometrics” by Yves Klein, or the “child like figures” by Jean Dubuffet. The narrative layering oven makes references to the mobility of repeated cinematic or televised “snapshots”. The fragmentary nature of the details of the images and their “freezing” is at times reminiscent of the tricks used in advertising spots. In the case of Marigo Kassi, however, this is an eloquent manner of speaking about beauty, but which has no relationship to the commercialized beauty and the way it deals with childhood, innocence, tenderness, the youth, adulthood and eroticism of women, through the fetishistic objects.

A beauty of framing, of material and texture, where the technique of the delicate pastels lends great sweetness to the image (child’s skirt) and the various accessories, (the various colored fabrics, and the gold, black and mauve tinted sequins), which all increase the …desire.

Things touched, aromas and images, which shoot forth from memory in discreet, nostalgia, muted journey through remembrance. But as the artist herself in 1994 on another occasion. “The interior condition and the exterior reference are mutually endured and in the end become identical”.

¹ Kiki Dimoula, “Complicities of a Spring Mood” from the collection “Of a Moment Together”, Ikaros, Athens 1998, Statement by R. Rauschenberg

Translated by Philip Ramp

Without Remorse

Eliana Chourmouziadou

Writer

Even while still a little girl I learned to pay attention to clothes. My mother was a very elegant woman, just like her mother, who even sewed as well. I remember the sewing room, with the sewing machine, the large mirror for the fitting, the round table covered with fabrics, patterns, pins and needles, the disorder, and everywhere the awareness of the use and the symbolism of each element of external appearance. Marigo Kassi brought this atmosphere back to life before my very eyes with unanticipated precision.

Commanding, almost overwhelming, the female presence is deified, right from the outset. Ankle socks and flat shoes, to insure balance. Steps that could be the movement of life itself or time running. Petite lace dresses, in colors, which stress that this age is still one of innocence. Then time makes the legs longer, the shoes acquire high heels, pointed toes and then are covered by iridescent shimmering sequins. The clothes tightly wrapped around the body are symbols of notional language. The materials call out for the hands to touch them. The overall effect is like the x-ray of a mind that is dreaming, longing and remembering. The contents of a closet are equal to the contents of imagination. In reality, I think, these pink and satiny clothes must be seen in the streets. These legs promise much more than they can actually realize. The forms, however, cover the entire spectrum: sometimes fleeting, diffident, other times mysterious as whispers which are held captive within the work, and at yet other times straight forward and erotic. And although they co exist with a reality (the kitchen utensils!), which that cannot be glamorized, which has no hope at all of ever charming, the pursuit of beauty always steals the show. Far removed from the prohibitive grandeur of classical beauty, it has been legitimized as an indispensable element of our psychic equilibrium, as the antidote against an environment more or less hostile to the human being.

I have the impression that Marigo Kassi has recapitulated with one glance the immediate world of a woman, whatever touches both her body and her soul: the clothes, the looks, the air moving in the hair of the little girls who run through these paintings. I would like to close with these girls. They remind me of our raging desires. There is no such thing as a human being without desires. They are the outstretched arms with which the soul holds on to the world. And yet, seeing these girls, I would like to say to them: do not have great expectations. No matter how much you may want to conquer the world, it will conquer you first.

Translated by Philip Ramp

Red, Wild and Black 

1999 Gallerie 3, Athens, Greece.

Nikos Xydakis

Journalist – Art Critic

The first thing that drew me two years ago to Marigo Kassi’s art was the colour red. A red that was on fire, provocative, bright and passionate. A red that you don’t come across in nature. It was one of those reds that are used in folk art in order to depict a rose, deep red pomegranates, or the heart of a faithful virgin in religious lithographs.

It was a red so extreme and much-used that it flirted with hideousness; it was the charming ambiguous boundaries of passion and prostitution.

After that mesmerizing red, you would notice the slight allegorical nature of the work, suggestive, and atmospheric. Faint human figures, a child’s swing, blurred photographs, which looked like they came from family unions and trips… The red tell us of pretend roses, it gave body and brilliance – it was pleasurable prostitution. The faint black (the darkness) was for the people, as if she had accepted that the human condition is permeated with nostalgia and grief.

I believe that these elements also dominate the best moments of the new exhibition. Human figures are combined to create two archetypes: one child/woman, with an autobiographical allusion, and an active “thief”, something which the artist calls herself. A third image is a suitcase. The thief often takes the suitcase, the box that hides something inside. The girl looks deep into the painting. With her back to the viewer she is looking back, to lapsed time or to the timelessness of dream. A woman looks at the viewer, or to an imaginary mirror, like in Velasquez’art, like a dream’s idol.

I don’t know if the thief steals innocence and is heading towards a coming of age, if he is stealing dreams, if he is stealing the creator’s old paintings. Maybe it’s better to stop analyzing dreams at this point, in order to look in more depth at the painted surface; I believe that therein lies the depth, there lie the secrets.

I immediately pick out a relatively small work, which has condensed practically al of this cycle of events. There are three dark figures, ambiguous, flowing three levels of charcoal, moving towards the left. The background above is white, a screen; below, the ground is a mark – dust and ashes the stuff that human bodies are made of – coming out of itself. On the charcoal marks are random red stains, suggestions of sweet, passionate pomegranates. The painting’s base is gold, sequined brocade, the most tangible human element, the material (perishable yet consoling) in a world of specters.

The dark human specters, the fire-red pomegranates of passion, and shamelessly decorative hem, are the main three characteristics of this art.

Kassi tell us of suggestive dreams, memories and fears, she abandons herself to the intoxication of colour (above all to red, but also to fuchsia and orange, and sometimes goes the other way: to green), she also abandons herself to the paroxysm of decoration, of the “matiere” of substance.

She layers hand-made paper – one on top of the other, half covering traces and making signs more hazy, she glues on pieces of wallpaper and draws over them, she makes pastel marks here and there, she erases and alleviates and then attacks again.

This is a constantly unfinished art, just like dreams and memories: what’s strong is what is unfinished, ambiguous. An abstract expressionism, which balances between profundity and painterly matter.

On the one hand, the ineffable; on the other, the intoxication and joy and artifice of color, of materials, of painting itself. In between, the painting itself. A sweet futility.

After Farewell

1997 Art Space 24, Athens, Greece.

Michel Feiss

Writer

A staircase which is not deeply worn by footsteps is, in its own view, something indifferent and melancholy made of wood – nothing more.

I believe that in her latest show Marigo Kassi follows this thought of Franz Kafka’s just as a dog follows its master. For the furniture she heaps on her canvas –relics from houses touched by death– seeks the traces of the people who used it. Hence the chair, the table, the wardrobe and the mirror are not a chair, a table, a wardrobe or a mirror; they are, above all, echoes of the gazes, the touching, the sound and the smells of those who experienced them.

These pieces of furniture from a house-moving exercise are pushed to the back of the visual field, in contrast to the painter’s earlier works in which they dominated the foreground, in a stressful and suffocating depiction. Yet memory works noiselessly and incessantly to transform the pain and the panic of absence into quiet mourning and meditation. Yes, Kassi adorns her past life by pasting roses or daisies and photocopies of snapshots from children’s birthday parties, in much the same way that a family looks after its beloved dead. To my eyes, these images are the tender burial offerings to an era that cannot come back – an era which is common to many of us.

Hydromones

1996 Athens Art Gallery, Athens / Zina Athnassiadou Art Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Aphrodite Kouria

Art Historian

Nature as a memory, filtered through time and the painter’s personal sensitivity, nature as a tangible, physical presence has concerned Marigo Kassi in recent years. The dominant element in her recent works is water. The ‘heavy’, silent water of the lake, a dark womb with its own mysterious, hushed life. In this case, too, Kassi treats the subject through her relationship with the painting materials –a relationship which constitutes the standard core of the artist’s quests. Experimenting with her materials and their behaviour, Kassi has applied the aquarelle over plaster to achieve a dull, heavy effect that fits the image of lake water. The surface seems to acquire a wet corporeality which has nothing of the lightweight translucence of the aquarelle.

Small boats can be seen on this haunted watery surface, moving in an upward direction. They could even be birds leaving the canvas to fly out in the air. A game of the hand but also a game of art, the boat-bird motif is symbolically charged in these works by the artist’s will, becoming a vehicle of flight, of passage to another space, literally as well as metaphorically. This ‘exit’ into space, the tendency to transcend the limits, is also formalised with purely plastic means, sometimes directly and sometimes more subtly. In some works the frame becomes an integral part of the image through the way the color is handled and the surface is processed, while elsewhere the canvas itself with its limits and geometry is cancelled out altogether. Yet even here a memory of the painterly frame persists, through the interaction between the painted surface and the wall.

With the use of plaster the painted surface and the layers of material on it –both central points in the artistic research of Kassi– acquire a particular plastic significance, which is conceptually intensified in some paintings by an emphasis on the frame of the image, where the use of chromatic frames points to old mural decorations. The memory from the frescoes of Pompeii, which marks the art of Kassi for some years now, has left its trace in a more theatrical way in her latest work.

Kyra-Frossyni

Aphrodite Kouria

Art Historian

For Marigo Kassi the encounter with the “myth”, on the given theme, was a challenge. Starting for the first time from a tangible subject, point of  reference, the artist wished to interpose to become familiar with it, from her contact with the painting medium- a contact that for years had been the core work. Work that never had a starting stimulant. Some elements of the story (especially the water) as she herself admitted, incited her sensitivity. Experimenting with her media and her behavior, Kassi found solutions that morph plastically served the deep meaning of the theme. Working with water-colours on stucco, she succeeded to give a dull, heavy colour impression that recalls the stagnant, dirty water of the lake where the bodies sink and rot. The surface acquires, one could say a liquid massivity which is far from the known light and transparency of the aquarelle. Suggestive images, haunted by the “taste” of death. The female body is dominant in its presence in some of her paintings, limiting the space; Bodies “dumb”, headless. Emphasis is given to the feminine element. In addition, the headless maimed body refere directly to violence, to the tortured death of the women.

The painted surface and the layers of her media on it, have been junction points of research for many years. Here they have acquired particularly with the use of stucco, a plastic significance with a specific conception of weight. They commit you to frescoes that time has left his signs on. The story-legend of long ago days like as a picture of an other era, seen through the filter of time. The small size of some of her works with “incidents” of the drama and of course the emphasis on the framework, on the bordering of each portrayal where one can sometimes dimly discern the will for stage setting of images, attest  this concept of the artist about her treatment of the subject-matter.

The inner space – The tightrope walker

1990 Nees Morfes, Athens, Greece.

Yiannis Ch. Papaioannou

1. The two complementary parts of this exhibition represent Marigo Kassi contemplations in the expression of space. Regardless of their different starting points both the “Inner space” as well as the “Tightrope walker” stipulate an internal path in two settings exchanging and interventing in such a wayas to strictly balance the artpiece between the representative and the subtractive.

2. The “Inner space” begins from a direct stimulus: this is the inside room-studio storage, a peaceful space full of canvases that “writes” through the cracks of the shutters. Kassi seeks to disband this  familiar space and to find a new connection expressing something more: an internal condition. Not  wanting to shift the light sources neither the setting of the objects, she conceives interventions, which lead to another degree of flexibility. She exploits the darkness to turn the shafts of light into flashes.  She adopts a savage but non the less lean and controlled gesture practically scrapping her colour, bringing the motionless space to life. Her nine artpieces in pastel and charcoal on paper constitute  processes of the same initial picture but through different selections which spark-off intriguing additive and subtractive processes. It is interesting to point out how many of her achievements and artistic discoveries are also used in the “Tightrope walker” series which in its turn enriches, with its own powers, the “Inner space”.

3. The “Tightrope walker” constitutes a walkabout of multiple approaches both from within and from around the picture. The subject constitutes an allegory of the artist’s fate who risks his whole existence striving for self discipline on the verge of the abyss. In his own “Tightrope walker” (1958). Jean Genet wispers  “Hunter and haunted, you expose yourself today, you who are both escape and pursuer. You approach yourself but for a moment only, in this deadly white loneliness”. The “Tightrope walker” is a series of 26 small (pastel on paper) and 4 large (oil, pastel on canvas) artpieces. Champion in a space, which at times resembles the Abyss and elsewhere, the circus down-stage, he is the lonely person who, while gripping the pole, balance on the tight rope of the ultimate vertigo’s. Flooded in light he discovers the secret capabilities of the tightrope in o deadly accurate dialogue between them. The audience which had shared a place in the synthesis, is now lost in the darkness. In certain artpieces the “Tightrope walker” resembles the Martyr Crucified, whereas later we observe his gradual disappearance. In the final art pieces the space is stripped of every human presence. What remains is a stage of metaphysical calm, where ropes, spotlights and swings act insinuatingly.

4. Kassi works on her subjects with the highest degree of discipline fully aware of how easily she could be lead to melodrama. She is aware, like the tightrope walker that the search has to take place with no concessions to the audience neither to leisure. She perceives what capabilities, willpower gives to the body when on the tightrope, she perceives the logic of danger and the need to express the maxima through the minimization of her means. With intentionally few colours, lean handling and  intense attention, she paints almost exclusively with the blade decisively “bringing out” the movement and light she pursues. In her larger artpieces she uses the rope stereoscopically, whereas movement and light are now depicted with harsh brushstrokes, even with the colourful directness of a bash from the tube itself.

5. Kassi painfully detaches her work from free space. Every one of her pictures, complementary to the previous, comes to remind us of those confidential words of Brague: “Confine yourself to the discovery, protect yourself from the explanation”.

The loss of the form in time

Eleni Vakalo

Poet – Art historian

The tightrope artists of Kassi are hovering over a void. Is this the space of the circus or a cosmic space? There is nothing to define it. Its material is light. This white-over-white acquires a texture but does not become a solid body; and it has neither a source nor an object to illuminate. This is ecstasy, no matter how one interprets it. It takes up the entire painting, and it is only towards the bottom that it thickens into some shapes or into an accumulation of darkness.

This darkness seems friendlier, more tangible. It is of equal value to that tiny shadowy figure which walks on the rope in the upper part of the canvas.. The taut rope, a grey line, is the main event in the painting. The tightrope walker is a spot. A spot in danger. His description is minimal; a shape from a single brush stroke, barely stated. Chromatically, he is vanquished by the brilliant light. The significance has shifted from the image to the concept. He is the one who walks over the void. The danger from the void is the issue that matters to the viewer.

A brief journey through the art of Marigo Kassi

Dimitris Plakas

MEDITERRANEAN Magazine

Excerpt. And behold the surprise. With its latest work, shown for the first time in our city, Kassi moves outdoors, to the exterior, to the open horizon. The first step is the garden – “the garden in Anavyssos” is the title given to this series by the painter. A definite painterly space, which brings to mind the salt pan and our literary memories from Elias Venezis’ Galini. An already charged landscape is further loaded by the paintings of Kassi. A stifling tenure. A grid with the occasional loophole here and there. “This is how I see the gardens”, the painter seems to agree with the poet. We as viewers and fellow travellers cannot but agree, struck as we are by the convincing ‘writing’.

Experiential layered structure, surprising overlays, fierce craft via an innermost introspective exploration through a poetic and mellow rendering: the visual palimpsests of Marigo Kassi.

The new artworks of Marigo Kassi impress with the coherence, the relevance and the sequence shared in the theme, the technique and the semantic conceptual of her creation. Many contrasting elements at various levels astonish with the contemplated birth and development of the artworks.

The technique determines altogether the conceptual framework, the iconographic and the completion of the artwork. Through a laborious, time–consuming process the artist creates her raw material which composes both the sublayer foundation and the surface. She creates her material using handmade papers on gauze which she waxes, she rips up, she colors, she reattaches with threads, photos, overpaintings, knittings of yarn, and colors black, grey and red maroon. Marigo during the preparation process of the papers, after the ripping, out of personal choice, she reattaches them, she apposes them in successive layers, she pastes and sews them with a strong thread, the one that the fishermen use for their fishnets. During this process, while attaching and securing them, at the same time she is wounding them. Finally, out of the destruction, something completely new is being created, airy, transparent, with optimistic colors and paper touches.

The artist herself compares her work with shreds, as in the old days when the women, out of necessity, but with knowledge as well, used to recombine pieces of fabric to make rag carpets. She herself admits: “Nobody can imagine how much durable this very thin paper is, how much suffering it can bear. A treatment as a torture ‘’. The paper with all this process can easily recall on the existence, the body, the human resilience and patience.  The violent process of ripping and sewing of the delicate paper, the wound being healed and recreated, it leads paradoxically, through an inner urge, to a joy of creation for the artist and a soul uplift for the spectator.

The incorporation of he own childhood photographs, such as in the ‘’Travel to Aegina’’ with her mother and other traces from personal experiential moments, as the ‘’Look’’ or ‘’ Mirror-child’’, with simplicity and sensitively give the whole composition an emotional and enigmatic sense, a psychoanalytical dimension. These particular artworks are all of small dimensions dated 2016.

Generally speaking, the artworks, iconographically, though mostly subtractively, apart from the emotions originated to the spectator, by their technique itself, they loose traces, memories, photographs, her distinctive signature, the symbol which returns, the girl running. Figures who hover with open hands, as the artwork ‘’In vacuity’’, a work with ten vertical hard sewings or pictures of the Acropolis and the Parthenon with shadows of young girls recalling memories and experiences. From the deep darkness, the red, maroon brushstrokes spring as an outpouring of life.

The intense common features of the works, well refined are four. The purely introspective, experiential trigger is reinforced by the violent and complex technique, enriched by the layering and the overlappings and finally, despite the inner and spiritual tense, the result presents paradoxically compositions with gentle, graceful and poetic outcome.

The artworks of Marigo compose palimpsests of memory through an experiential process of psychoanalytical dimensions, where the wound as memory and experience leads to a poetic spirit and beauty of existence, transfusing a pleasure.