Irini Iliopoulou works conscientiously as a painter since the Eighties. So far, her narrative seemed to be consisting of representations of faces, landscapes, or scenes in general. Irini used these representations as opportunities to „talk“ about the hidden beauty of everyday life, as well as to give prominence to all these chances provided by the means depicting it: the Art of Painting. However, behind the reassuring façade of her works, there was another, latent reality, witnessing a slight dose of melancholy and bearing references to the historical or mythical past. However, with her most recent artworks, she introduces a whole new narrative and marks her comeback with a bunch of brand new techniques. Irini Iliopoulou enters a mysterious, onirical and intensely personal world and enriches it with an intensely psychoanalytical approach. The artist seems like trying to paint her own dreams. Her artworks, in large dimensions, look like „frozen“cinema frames from a film trying to keep equal distance between dreams and nightmares.
Irini Iliopoulou's last show in Athens (2004) ended on a high note with balloons aloft, drifting by forest fairgrounds, ephebes and nymphettes astride runaway carousel ponies, cantering off into the sunset… something of a precursor to this present body of works. A surprise that's been several years in the making and kept secret until now. In this most personal exhibition, little children take center stage. Like a sequence of dreams, these new paintings explore childhood memories and fantasies that are at once intimate recollections and universal archetypes – Irini's fairy tales. Here the painter treats us to girlhood treasures – beloved trinkets and keepsakes taken out once more to play. In these works she delves into the unconscious, exploring the notion of 'screen memories' − how we remember, represent and even fabricate the stories of our past. Her recent paintings reflect the ambivalent nature of these remembrances, the deceptiveness of dreams and how the artist transcribes this nebulous state onto the canvas.
Irini Iliopoulou’s last exhibition, Small Tropics (2009), featured imaginary voyages and oneiric escapades in which the protagonists were all school-aged children. The paintings were born of a lengthy gestation, a long period of soul-searching in the wake of wrenching personal loss. Recovering remembrances and reimagining her childhood years was a kind of recreation of her history.