“Togetherness”, 31/03/2011 – 21/05/2011

On Thursday, March 31 at 8.00 in the evening Maria Demetriades opens the exhibition “Togetherness”, The joy of coexistence with the latest work of Maria Grigoriadi at the Medusa Art Gallery.
The title is a question, about a joy undermined by lack of space, i.e. lack of time or inclination. Large acrylics and oils with images from thousands of mundane lives. Countless parallel snapshots, as if told by an ancient storyteller, are crowded like hints on the canvas. Stories nesting one into the other. An attempt at a collective cry, with bright and joyful colours as the medium. There is no protagonist, no core theme. Everything is equal, spread out, dissolved; relative. An attempt at bringing together remote worlds on the pretext of a shared emotion. A simultaneous gaze at far away and right here. The ‘before’ and the ‘now’. Our own and the other one. The large and the small. The alien. A (political) denunciation whose weapon is the magic of images and symbols. Violence and blood, the red colour of fire. The process as love, as sacrifice. A profound testimony made through a ceaseless struggle, enjoyable and sometimes carnivorous; the canvas itself decides without you what to keep and what to reject. Dream, reality, childhood obsessions and, recently, the faded images from the oriental roots in Asia Minor emerge subconsciously—or overlap. Just as when you bury something in the ground and it bears fruits. This is a harvest, a garden. Birth. The distortional mirror of Painting is my own way of understanding reality. It means to fight, to endure, to resist.
Maria Grigoriadi studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, painting under N. Kessanlis (1982-1987), stage design under V. Vassiliadis (1985-1987) and lithography under Th. Exarchopoulos (1983-1985). Greek State scholarships: Painting (1983-85), Stage Design (1987), grant for postgraduate studies in painting in Greece (1991-94). She is associated with the Medusa Art Gallery since 1994, and this is her fifth solo exhibition. She has participated in many group shows in Greece, Bulgaria, Dubrovnik, Belgium, China and Paris. Her works are included in numerous collections in Greece and abroad.
Duration of the exhibition: 31 March – 21 May, 2011
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 11:00 – 14:00 & 18:30 – 21:30
Saturday 11:00 – 15:00

T.S.ELIOT

FOUR QUARTETS ( Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York 1943)

“East Coker v,” No.2 from “The Four Quartets”

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years – Twenty

years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres -

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate –But there is no competition- There is only the fight to

recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

“Little Gidding v” No.4 from “The Four Quartets”

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

A DREAM(From the Poetic Collection: The number 1981, Alianza)

In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell… The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Suzanne Jill Levine) Poetry, “A Dream,” The New Yorker,July6,2009,p.82