As far back as 1992 Irini Iliopoulou made her presence felt at the Salon de Mars with her bovines- massive volumes, stolidly graceful in their largeness, serenely imposing in their dignified watchful silence. Creatures that sit and wait amidst burnt earthen tones, the tawny and chocolate hues of marsh and wetlands, the dank dregs of bog. And then she left these beasts behind in Paris to uncover the terrain of southern France.
For me Irini is an old friend with whom I became acquainted through her wintry vineyards, gardens full of dew and moss at dusk, marshes the color of the sky, movie houses and theater halls draped in decadent imperial purple. Moreover, her royal purple hues provided the occasion several years ago to explore a fertile question about her entire body of work. Back then she had conveyed a sense of these halls in her canvases through a singular calibration of silence. At least that’s how those hushed ensembles observed behind steamy windows at odd hours imprinted themselves on my memory. Morning hours, most probably. And they immediately revived in me a nostalgia for childhood curiosity as regards the debunked magic of these entertainment halls when I observed them without visitors, with no activity, with a justifiable compassion for their forsaken magnificence.
We experience the first theory of art, which does not include any powerful critique on the form. Until the late Modernist period, what was obvious is that critics and critiques didn‘t care about anything else than the form. Since then, we are bothered by anything else, but we are completely reluctant to make references to issues related to the form.