In Irini Iliopoulou’s latest works, animals inhabit the wilds of her imagination. Here we behold the embodiment of her ‘inner farm’ [a variant on the ‘inner child’ = ‘το παιδί µέσα της’/‘το εσωτερικό παιδί της’]. From her canvases placid cows cast the viewer a sideways glance wary of our carnivorous cravings. Indeed, Irini Iliopoulou has been observing bovines for decades, famously presenting a series of cow portraits at the 1990 Salon de Mars in Paris with the Berggruen Gallery. Throughout her career, she has drawn from her menagerie but usually in a sleight-of-hand – partially concealing or camouflaging animal creatures in her landscapes and tableaux, a game of hide-and-seek. But starting in the summer of 2021 she began modeling miniature animal totems in clay on the island of Kassos and ended up sculpting her own ceramic bestiary (included in exhibition & present catalogue) that she subsequently incorporated into her paintings. At the same time, she found herself revisiting some of her earlier compositions – favorite settings and scenes she wanted to re-enter thus she reappropriated these works to introduce her creaturely companions. In this way, familiar faunae are featured in unaccustomed places, as Irini ‘rewilds’ a vacant lot on a city street with a brigade of feathered friends – chickens, roosters, ducks, geese. The eponymous dairy cow Bella stands in front of a wall graffitied with primitive masks that accentuate her gentle demeanor.
The co-star of the exhibition, a donkey named Harry, stands atop a hillock putting us in mind of Robert Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar (1966) which features a beast of burden – a sad-eyed, defenseless donkey abandoned to a pitiable plight at the hands of one abusive master after another [and its poignant contemporary sequel EO (2022) by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski], a storyline familiar from fabulists of old. However, none of Irini’s equines are bridled, saddled or tethered. For this new series of paintings, Irini unlocked the paddock and flung open the barn doors to let all the livestock out.
In her last exhibition Locus of Desire in 2021 the surreal held sway in compositions where ‘forest bathing’ [from the Japanese shinrin-yoku or ‘immersion in nature’] was celebrated: schoolroom desks crop up in the woods where a movie is projected on a silver screen; a body is enmeshed in the weave of a hammock like a chrysalis; three empty swings float in tandem in a scene that has an underwater inertness. Up until the present Irini did not put animals centre stage, apart from her cow studies of 1990. In earlier works, creatures remain in hiding or are playfully hinted at. Her older works also contain many allusions to the affiliation painter/conjurer that underpins her process: dolls, puppets, cut-outs, marionettes, dummies, automatons are among the props she maneuvers in her arrangements.
The new paintings exude a chromatic exuberance: peach-blossom sand that bears the bovines’ reflections against the backdrop of azure hues of a darkening sky and crystalline green shallows that lap at the beach. The underbellies of the four-legged animals are incandescent. A medley of pink-mauve-fuchsia with two lone bulls watering in the background while white ducks congregate in the foreground bordered by a dense mesh of oleander, sand lilies and irises. Cows ruminating in a mauve marsh with an iridescent sunset for backdrop. Elsewhere the blush of a rose-tinted sunrise. A shade of dayglow pink streaks through all the paintings while palm trees punctuate the farm views. A golden retriever’s blond head emerges from a wall of pale pink flowers. Autumnal orange scenery against which pigs, ducks, geese and roosters root about in the mauve leaves of a vineyard where a spindly branch forms a perfect hoop. A gang of randy, amber-eyed goats vies for the viewer’s attention. A luminous white bull looms at the edge of a forest recalling Zeus’s metamorphosis to seduce Europa, evoked here by the head of a frightened girl watching from the bushes, the unique human presence in this exhibition.
In all the paintings the animals seem to be in conversation with one another – their pricked ears and cocked heads balancing the composition. A numinous aura surrounds the bovines in their individual frames where steers and cows acquire an emblematic valence, irradiating a kind of immanence. Like so many icons Irini idolizes her domesticated animals by surrounding them in luxuriant vegetation meanwhile the absence of their fellow humans renders their embodiment more eloquent.
While the cow or bull in certain religions is worshipped as sacred, the donkey is almost ubiquitously associated with lowly labor. Likewise, being changed into a donkey is viewed as an ignoble debasement that is sometimes coupled with bestiality in the so-called “ass narratives” starting from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass [or Metamorphoses 2nd century AD]. It is the story of a young man Lucius’ fascination with witchcraft that led to his metamorphosis into a donkey that would in turn inspire episodes in Boccaccio’s Decameron and in Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream where Bottom’s head is transformed into a donkey’s and his companion exclaims in horror “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated!”. In the same vein, donkeys were denigrated in Greek comedy, comparable in stature to filthy swine and regarded as asinine. Horses however are emulated for their grace and stateliness in all cultures, the object of many a young girl’s infatuation. Irini subscribes to another tradition following which the donkey is cherished as a loyal, surefooted companion: Don Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza’s attachment to his burro Dapple and Nobel-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s ode to his beloved old donkey entitled Platero y Yo [Platero and I] (1914). Furthermore, according to European Christian doctrine, a donkey brought Mary to Bethlehem to give birth to Christ in a manger and Jesus entered Jerusalem to celebrate Passover humbly riding a donkey.
It’s no coincidence that domesticated animals are the protagonists of choice in nursery rhymes, fables and fairy tales. We need only glimpse the Aesop index or peruse the list of La Fontaine’s collected fables to verify their primacy. Representations of animals in medieval bestiaries served as allegories with Christian connotations used for teaching moral lessons, devotional reading and entertainment. Domesticated animals (as opposed to fantastical beasts) have been charged with symbolism and lore since time immemorial because they have always lived alongside us as our familiars and companions. They occupy a privileged place in our collective imagination as vehicles of stories. Likewise, the farm or homestead represents an ideal microcosm in ancestral memory, a kind of founding myth that children are initiated into from a very young age by way of toys, games, picture books, and animation. Unlike the warring factions of animal characters in George Orwell’s 1945 satire against totalitarianism, the protagonists in Irini’s animal farm coexist peacefully, aglow in the Arcadian dawn.
Andrea Schroth
October 2024