Irene’s presence fills space and time unexpectedly, surprisingly, like meadows of fragile sand lilies emerging on the most visited landscapes of Santorini and Rhodes –unexpectedly, surprisingly. We’re not talking about some sort of terra incognita here, an unexplored country; on the contrary. This is the alternate reality created by a new way of seeing things, a power that rearranges and transforms things so that they speak many more stories than at first sight. The gaze of the painter and the gaze of the traveller run parallel in this sense. This is, after all, the noticeable difference between those two and an ordinary visitor. In reality, there are no new places to be discovered; only new gazes to be entertained, to embrace familiar landscapes and transform them into novel ones, both mentally and on the canvas.