[…] In her works, Maria Ktistopoulou, takes some of the routes officered by the dynamics of the eye as is strives to coneive a truth usually concrealed behind the phenomena. With astounding facility in the use of line, this artist succeeds in recording facets o0f the real which are subject to illusory verisimilitude. In her specific case, the traces of art and life tend to touch upon one another using as an intermendiary the artifice of tromp l’ oeil and the transcendence of distance, just as Leonardo da Vinci did in his Cre- atiton, that unique instance of human powers approximating to divine properties. Such properties revel the parallel to be drawn between two different forms of determinismi (against the background of their own transendenve), in the name of the myth of art and what is, ultimately, the vanity of worldly things.[…] […] The eye gains the ability to throw bridges across distances, retaining all its psychodynamic energy. Faces which emerge into the field of vision in the glow of their presence appear quite unexpectedly, as if they were disclosing fragments of stories which have been lost and won back, which have faded over time- though memory has kept their traces so as to produce them once more transformed, in a series of reflections. Shors, clouded scenarios of life are written on colour and form behind doors, railings and apertures, and in the sudden clarings of a darknbess filled with the whispers of forgotten visions and secret passions. The life itself has escaped, however, leaving only some pareticles, to mark its passage. Scores of eyes roam behind a forgotten, marginal place which touch, illusority identified with vision, recalls to mind. In that place are welling eyes that tell us of the traumas causes by the pareadox of life, which allude to riddles and questions about all they have seen and come to know, about what they believed and was belied. […] […] It is on this wager that Maria Ktistopoulou has founded her myth. With verisimilitude, realistic pretexts and an Expressionist cast, of mind, she collest, shelters and dwelling- places for the eye- an eye whose style, muances and tensions we see in mir- rors as we strive to solve their mysteries and the secrets of a hinterland. The artist initiates us into that hinterland, inviting us to share it with her an visual ground of doubtful credibility, in which we can recognize all the things hidden behind the screens of the conventions used on each occasion.
Athena Schina
Critic and Historian of Art