Heleni Polichronatou

In the age of interculturalism in which we live, the watertight compartmentalization of what were the old divisions as to the genres and categories of art is being lost. A work of Art is now defined by the range of the concepts and ideas which in includes and by the qualities of the aesthetic co-ordinates with which the artist opens a dialogue with the beholder. In any event , it is the references made a work and the inner mechanisms of the structure, of the surfaces and of their meanings in relation to the ways which constitute the suggestions of the artist΄s language which lend the work its autonomy and its resonance in time.

is the not the first time that Heleni Polichronatou has demonstrated the seriousness and responsibility with which she approaches the matter. Her intention is to bring out the golden means between discourse and the image, the drawing and the form, abstract conception and the symbol, the motif and its transformation, the plot of narrative and its poetic syneresis. She uses methods of sculpture when she paints and at the same time paints as she processes its form-structuring elements with a sculptor΄s feeling and a mood of dialectic between the masses and the outlines, in the light which is released from the interior of each figure or in the darkness through which she emerges to state her presence in the ’’ energy ‘’field of action of the forms.

Usually, the artist is inspired by lines from poems or verbal fragments which speak of man and nature, the role of the individual who acts between laws of freedom and contradictions of life, in an effort to fashion a map of self – knowledge.

Her designs, which could be surfaces of sculptures, are reminiscent of extracts from forgotten or unknown «stories » of an adventure in time and space, between the flora of the dreams of youth and the orbits traced by asteroids in the firmament.

The lines from which Heleni Polichronatou draws her stimuli for what she presents- through the freedom of her imagination – finally become transmutations of the script itself into an image which is imbued as a process with an inner rhythm; the space begomes form and the «negative » of what is now the reversed and abstract form becomes a space with the potential for the appearance of a succession of image –symbols, which state and at the same time cancel out their meanings in the «weaving » of an eternal field for escapades in design.

Labyrinthine and summary «narratives» describe the vital traffic of a fluid situation which unites and combats antitheses, inaugurating a dialogue with magnitudes distances and meanings of the attainable and the unattainable.

The active material is transformed into an act of scripture and the act of scripture into a testimony of an osmotic process which makes reference to a «horror vacui» and the primeval memory of a «fear of the void».

Nothing is empty or can exist in a jejune state in the works of Heleni Polichronatou. The boundaries between the past and the present disappear, just as those do between light and darkness, presence and absence, a quickened awareness and oblivion, the gesture and the imprint

Material and light collaborate in the world which the artist΄s works reveal to us, as if the hand of a child is tracing out routes of thought and pathways of the imagination, though a guileless gaze which has not yet made the acquaintance of rationalization.

As the design – forms of Heleni Polichronatou perform acrobatics in the firmament, they overturn conventions. A constant movement, metamorphosis and re-ordering of motifs adds to the instability an enigmatic quality and to the freedom of negotiation a poetic verve. The language becomes a link joining hints with intentions, desires with doubts, images which release their meanings from captivity with meaning which are being revised.

The designs, which are also capable of operating as under paints for ideas in sculpture and as proposals for spatial works of Heleni Polichronatou, create a kind of artistic meadow. There, even the most daring of dreams can spring up, even though they are shown as by their very nature beyond our grasp and fleeting, like migratory birds.