PRESENTATION: Marina Bompou-No Matter How Many Years Will Pass

Marina Bompou, with pencil on paper, in her solo exhibition titled “No Matter How Many Years Will Pass”, carves out personal stories, memories, and relationships that touch and deeply move us. This is because through her realism and honesty, the personal both contains and is contained within the collective. With a poetic gaze, she uses a material like Japanese paper—soft, malleable, and at the same time resilient—which, through special processing, balances between the tangible and the intangible, unraveling the thread of narrative with the pencil as co-narrator, revealing her personal story to the viewer piece by piece.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marina Bompou Archive

“The pencil is a very sensitive medium that can also become very raw. For what I want to narrate, color does not fit”, the artist says. The use of black and white is a reference to an era when photographs were monochromatic, but also to a time of minimalism, as this body of work was created during the quarantine and lockdown—a sequence of arresting images where the artist explores the notion of home, dwelling, and family. “Our memories are timeless, it’s like I’m walking through the house with the memories and holding on to them,” she says, and continues: “Paper is a humble material, yet it holds so much within it—it’s revelation, light, purity, a beginning—tabula rasa. It contains fragility, sensitivity; it’s both lowly and precious at the same time, as it refers to human communication, from letters and postcards to nautical charts.” Bompou is interested in the sense of touch and the feeling it evokes, and even her sculptural installations are made of Japanese paper. She loves Japan—motifs from the fabrics her grandfather brought back from his travels are scattered throughout her work. “Paper is not a material I chose—it chose me. Japanese paper embraces the pencil and stands with grace alongside it.”

“With these works, I enter everyone’s home,” the artist emphasizes, as her work reflects an era of Greece. A Greece that received refugees from Asia Minor, a Greece of social and political upheavals, of internal migration and the blending of populations, a Greece of her ancestors, of customs and cultural influences—and ultimately the ancestors of us all. Through depth and personal introspection over time, Marina Bompou, in her visual art, offers a contemporary homage to her forebears. Their professions, objects, spaces, and memories from her childhood compose her personal universe, from which her artistic experience emerges—since, according to Roland Barthes, “Our true homeland is our childhood.” Paraphrasing him: the homeland of the contemporary artist is memory and emotion, images and stories that compose their personal narrative and shape their artistic imprint.

Photo: Marina Bompou, Grandma Marina, 2020, pencils on 280 gr paper, 50 x 70 cm, © & Courtesy the artist

Info: Curator: Efi Michalarou, War Museum, Leof. Vassilisis Amalias 22, Nafplion, Greece, Duration: 19/7-17/8/2025, , Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-21:00