Arctic landscape

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  Storms | 2009 - 2014

The historian Nikos Sigalas, Institut Français d'Etudes Anatoliennes, writes: The work on display constitutes nature's epic: austere in words (in the signs of men) yet powerful as the hour of the tempest or a summit's moment of illumined unconcealment. If one was inclined to literary analogy, one would refer to excerpts from Conrad or Melville. "Isabella" an outlandish and mysterious work, yet far removed from mysticism and the pretentious, is steeped in an oceanic feeling, similar to what one encounters in Moby Dick - and the storm battered caravel cannot fail to remind the readers of the Great Eastern, the haunted sailboat Alberta. While the "Storm" which is fluid and erratic like the infinitesimal snapshot of a tempestuous sea, brings to mind those moments in Conrad's rich yet precise language, when we are given the awe of the seamen confronted by the vast, ineffable ocean. And one could go on, with more references to thrifty and ecstatic works - for all genuine ecstasy is not ostentatious. No such literary exercise is necessary. Olga Alexopoulou is sparing with words, her images speaking in silence, mute words in a language beyond the common sign, a turbulence of depth. How far beyond language reposes a summit, an arctic landscape, a thriving anemone, the sea itself. And how far beyond theatre; yet still a play, that does not limit itself to detailing complexes, but rejoices in song - not the wild bacchanal, but the serene, omnipotent eternal joy of nature, whose dominion we pretend in vain to have mastered. What is communicated through Olga's work is that art, mirroring nature, remains forever untamed, impossible to be exhausted by our ambitions. It lies exactly where those ambitions end, in the vast untamed dominions that life's communion with the imagination opens up before us; in the stars, the seas and summits that exist all around, while dwelling deep within.