ELEFTHEROTYPIA – 9 April 2000
Maria Marangou
Dora Pulmann
To the principles of painting which has just been liberated from the shackles of strict depiction, to the principles of an art with multiple means of expression it appears anarchic, yet it retains a fully balanced relationship between form and colour.
What does photography tell us?
About the equal value of straight and curved lines, about the cavity that hosts or and even makes the body, about the space within a space, the body within the body.
In her fourth solo exhibition at the “Medusa” Gallery, Dora Pulmann organises her canvas with dynamic lines which delineate the body. This outline can be minimised or enlarged — at least, that is the impression given by its plasticity.
Where does paining point to?
To archetypal symbols and archaic figures, of course, all familiar to latent memory.
Yet Pulmann’s influences, in this particular case, come from Picasso’s Mediterranean period and, even more, from the funerary works of her teacher, Yannis Moralis.
Desire lies in forms and colours which can be rendered directly on the wall, in close relation to the ground.
A kind of mural?
Very likely.
Even more likely, it is an expression of the artist’s desire to negotiate with nature and appropriate its own shapes.
Ependytis – 9 April 2000
Vivi Vassilopoulou
The enigma of reality and appearance
“If art was not the main expression of personal view there would be no history of art”, says Ε. Η. Gombrich, who asks elsewhere: “Doesn’t this variety of artistic activity ultimately help us explain the complex images of many contemporary artists?”
These thoughts came to me when I saw the exhibition of Dora Pulmann at the renovated “Medusa” Gallery (Xenokratous St; until May 6), with works that hover between reality and appearance, on a virtual edge where a visual reality is created.
If readers should find this somewhat enigmatic, a single photograph would be enough to start them thinking, while the show itself would urge them to trace the underlying images or even create their own images on the web provided by the artist.
Rugged and solid
What we have to state here is that this is a rugged, solid web capable of holding equally solid images and shapes, moulding volumes and shadows, condensing itself into the essence or expanding in content. Capable of excluding and including; of insightfully answering the “enigma of style” and devising a new enigma hidden in the next image, inviting the viewer to a visionary participation where psychology is by no means an unknown factor.
“Since art is associated with the human mind, any scientific study of art shall inevitably be psychology. It can be other things as well, of course, but it will certainly be psychology”, says May J. Friedlander in “On art and knowledge”.
More sayings come to mind with this exhibition: “Iconology already traces the allegorical and symbolic function of images, their relation with everything that could be called the invisible world of ideas” or the artists’ ability to use forms, lines shadows or colours and produce those mysterious spectres of reality we call “images”.
As an “amorphous and infinite mass” with “its own place in space”, “finite and delineated”.
TO VIMA – Tuesday, 4 April 2000
Katia Afrara
The adventure of light and shade
In the new work of Dora Pulmann, on show at the “Medusa” art gallery, the form is sought through the constant transmutation of light and shade. “The painter”, according to art critic Athina Schina, “records processes of transmutation in her works. The image changes along a series of insinuations. A course through interconnected structures and surfaces, through what the light allows to be seen and what it gestates, transforms or subverts darkness”. The artist explains to To Vima: “Even my earlier works, where the colours were darker, always had a kind of brightness. Now the light is generated by a pale yellow, while shade is represented by black charcoal”.
Being non-figurative, the painting of Dora Pulmann is ‘completed’ with the viewer’s ‘activation’. “Matter is ‘depicted’ through the emotion it triggers. This is why I avoid using titles in my works – I think they obstruct the viewer’s communication with my work”, she explains and talks about the key-concepts which open the way to understanding her elliptic, abstract “narrative”: composition, harmony, aesthetic. Having studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, under Yannis Moralis in painting and Vassilis Vassiliadis in stage design, the artist readily admits the influence of both teachers on her painting. “The influence of Moralis was great on the range of colours, the thoroughly researched forms, the balance of the composition, the preparations beneath the colours, which have a Byzantine character… On the other hand I was always interested in stage design, although I never worked professionally for the theatre”, comments the painter whose presence has been quite regular in recent years– this is her third solo exhibition since 1994 – although there was a ‘gap’ of thirteen years after her first appearance on the art scene in the early ’80s. “I needed that absence – the process of maturing is necessary for creativity. In that time I came to realise various things, such as the need for introspection — a very pressing need, with so many images surrounding us”.
Athina Schina
MEDUSA ART GALLERY
Between the discerned and the discernible, between legacies and expectations, between the continuaIIy transforming pictorial interior of the subconscious and the ever-changing outer phenomena, there develops a sequence of potentials abstractedly interwoven like conjunctive tissue. But even this bodily, material and inscribed conjunctive tissue of scenic portrayals is not characterised by stability, since whatever we ostensibly perceive is subject to the theory of relativity. Consequently, what parameters aIlude to the staying power of an image, and what morphological changes reveal or encumber the need for its manifestation when the artist invokes it? Dora Pulmann has no rapport with figurative images. Through a process of contractionaI abstractions, the painter expresses in her works the pulsating expressionistic dynamism of manifold reality. Α reality having power to convince, because it does not present the conventionalities of outright recognition. Such conventionalities have given way to subjective functions and necessities, provocation and ambivalence, equivocation and invalidation of visual standards. The conversion of matter into energy and vice versa, the transition of organic into inorganic forms, the mysteries that generate life, and the process of death which leads nature to regeneration, correspond with the chemistry of memory, feelings and impressions. The unconscious, associations and archetypes are not absent 1rom the rendering of the image, which is identified with fluidity, as fluid as their balance of light and shade, intensity and subsidence in time and space, and given to the viewer's visual detection. Pulmann sees light as frequency and fluctuation, through its natural range. Light, as well as colours with their hues (as and when she uses them), and darkness with its own gradations, are converted into vehicles of penetration and pursuit. The painter depicts mutational processes om her works. The altered image follows an allusive course. Α course which interconnects such forms and surfaces as light allows to be seen and such as darkness purports, transmutes or invalidates. The writing brings to light eventualities resulting from sensuous life scenes, via a conducive dramaturgy of alternate "visual" episodes or matters kept under wraps. Composite reality is adapted to the rules of syntactics, and clarified through its punctuation marks. The works of Pulmann constitute oscillograms presented as enigmas between phenomenology and ontoIogy. Moreover, they portray ways of thinking and feeling, articulation cultivated by reality, myth and imagination, through their unrestrained verbal activity. The onlooker is motivated by the drift of these felt visual landscapes in order to travel, escaping from logic to truth's utopia. Truth, which transcends nightmares and dreams, because its source is the very adventure that occasions and sustains the vast geography of our inner world.
