INTERVIEW: Io Angeli – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Io Angeli performs a slalom between painting and drawing, in an exhibition where large-scale paintings coexist with small drawings in a masterful manner. The interplay of interior and exterior, nature in the city, as well as the artist’s handling of confinement and quarantine, take center stage in her work, with the drawings interwoven as small fairy tale narratives of the larger story she tells us through her new body of work, as revealed in the interview that follows.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Io Angeli’s Archive

The title of your new solo exhibition at Zoumboulakis Gallery is “Slalom”. Except for the slaloms you had to do during the quarantine period to travel from your home to your studio, you have also created an artistic slalom, as we have witnessed in your exhibition, which is exceptional. Painting succeeds the drawing in a masterful way… How did this relationship came about?

Drawing has always been a part of my work, as a draft, like organizing the canvas or a reference that I never followed exactly. The drawing has the immediacy of the here and now, with two lines the idea can be captured, the face opposite.
During the period of lockdown, drawing became a one-way street, it was the only possible expressive media I had access to take notes and capture the oxymoronic stillness of an unprecedented condition. In this exhibition, the drawings are autonomous, having worked as a unit of references, both in what I saw and in what could imaginatively happen.
Gradually, the journey from home to the studio created two bodies of work with different gestures and expressive media, but with a common core of research: the intensity of nature’s growth. An artistic slalom from one space to another, from one expressive medium to another, from one gesture to another.

Apart from the gesture, what separates and unites the two media in your artistic perception?

All these differences in sizes and materials are in conversation with each other. The drawings are organized through the narration that we encounter in dreams, myths, and allegories, when incompatible things are intertwined with each other, and with free associations, a new image emerges. Painting on canvas with colors of small tonal gradations, close to those of graphite, has a more targeted search in the natural space that is evolving In absentia. The images of the drawings and the colors function both in parallel and autonomously.

Just like the exhibition’s setup, which is very different from what we have been accustomed to so far, is happening at this time both domestically and abroad, combining and conversing works with different shapes and sizes in a harmonious way. Do you consider it is a result of the lockdowns and COVID?”

Regardless of the specific circumstances that served as a catalyst, the conventional setup of exhibitions has been reconsidered. We see, with great interest, dissimilar materials, analogies, intentions, and references of works coexisting, so as to create a multifaceted visual environment. When the exhibition was set up, I saw more clearly how everything becomes one, crafted by the same hand, with the same quiet concern.

Nature is at the center of your work in this series of works, how important is nature for you? Is your work a commentary on the destruction and mistreatment of nature?

It is more of a hymn to the eternal power of nature. It exists without our presence, while the opposite is not true. Every branch, every leaf can exist and participate in growth and decay. I do not paint solely to capture the beauty of nature, but also the symbolism of occupying spaces that are abandoned and sprouting anew.

Nature, space, and the space in between. We observe that in the intermediate space, in the void, you create a third space that each time its management is different. How important is it and what does it aim to enunciate, to narrate to the viewer?

Usually, the space that intervenes is inert, but I am interested in making it visible, to give it an identity. The intermediate space, in its awkwardness of being defined, is colored or discolored while we see floating elements, such as snowflakes, flying lemons in front of models of buildings, or raindrops in wetlands. It is a bridge between the first level of the artwork and the last, in the depth of the image. It is the space that declares what is happening.

The colors of the paintings, as well as the drawings and the animals in the drawings, all have a fairy-tale texture… Are these your own fairy tales? What is your relationship with fairy tales and storytelling, and what is their importance in our time?

Storytelling in every form, be it shadow, pause, or intensity, of a building or an animal, the non sequitur of analogies, all together weave a personal world with distant origins. Since we are not talking about the representation of a real space, the deer or the fox take on the symbolisms that we know from stories, myths, and allegories. The image is unexpected one way or another, a cloud may inhabit a room or an oversized plant may converse with an empty chair, this is the charm of art, it makes the unimaginable happen… Our era has experienced a multitude of expressive forms, it has developed great tolerances or has embraced trends and movements. Certainly, myth touches on a sensitive part of the art self.

Download Greek version here.

Info: Zoumboulakis Gallery, 20 Kolonakiou square, Athens, Greece, Duration: 2/2-11/3/2023, Days & Hours: tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-20:00, Wed & Sat 11:00-15:00, www.zoumboulakis.gr/