One might describe the latest work of Maria Ktistopoulouu as a humn to nature, in which this gifted artist succeeds in informing each individual work with her own metaphysical approach, whether the subject is a landscape or a single piece of fruit, functioning at one and the same time as both transitter and receiver of the various stimuli which inspire the painter and which she in turn convert to the visitor as he views the work.
In every instance Ktistopoulou, whose previous work involved the decoding of “still lives” succeeds in orchestrating a whole atmosphere through the freedom with which she now views the natural world and the direct communication she enjoys with it. A communication through which the artist succeeds in faturing the very care of the stimulus she has felt and re-creating and reshaping it to convey the same strength of feeling to the spectator.
Through a vibrant and highly sensitive palette of colors the painter seems to share with us the pure form of exactly that mental and emotional reaction with which she responded to each stimulus. Each of her compositions thus functions like the record of a mental state, re- creating vividly, and authentically, the breath of the earth itself, the sap of the trees, the vitality of the grass. She thus succeeds in converying through each of her figurative works an abstract atmosphere, an atmosphere which in is absolute reality incited our imagination to surrender to its own items- a feature which is a touchstone for any manifestation of real art. […]
[…] A gifted artist, Ktistopoulou secceeds in countinually and radically renewing herself, retaining as the connecting, link between the different phases of creation her genuine sensibility and penetrating intellectual and spititual powers- always combined with a keen sensitivity to colour and an inexhaustible energy of line. Thus from her very first drowings of maked human figures, her portraits, her abstract compositions inspired by the world of the sea, her figurative – yet so poetic- works in the series Crupts, up until the compositions of the present- all through them runs an invisible but definite thread, unfolding its hidden implications and inevocably offering ever new pretexts for inspired visual and mental approaches.
These are the works of an artist of genuine passion and true artistic vitality.
Dora Iliopoulou-Rogan Ph.D.
Art Historian- Art Critic