BY MARINA PETRI

MY PAINTING AND MYKONOS

When you enter middle age, there is one world ahead you and another one behind you, and in both of them there are laughter and tears, the real, the conscious, the unconscious and the boundary where dreams begin.
I remember the games of my childhood on the paved floors, on the stone benches, o the staircases, on the stone walls, on the sand, under the sun and the stars of Mykonos, where I always said: "When I grow up, my house will have a room for painting".
It seems that childhood wishes come true.
I became a painter, and an artist at that, being also creative in other areas, parallel to those of the arts. Then studies came, and traveling became a reality, a start was made, and there has been a course with no end.
I studied colors, forms, composition, the expression of art history, all those things that were created and enforced during the last centuries in the heart of Europe and America. I left my country setting off on a tour of Europe and got the echo of America. In the discipline I studied, under any signal of knowledge and conquest, I kept bumping upon my Greek past.
I tried to let go my sick ancestral worship, where the danger often lurks for you to surrender to a fatalism expressed in the words, "What could I possibly accomplish, since everything has already been accomplished?" However my life was... now. And all this was alive now...
Now I paint together with a shadow-theater character that keeps emerging every day from my inner self.
He is soft in color and shade. He is hard to describe. He is absolute in form.
He is riversible in balances. He is clear in geometry. He is unending in philosophy. He is erotic. He is neither little nor much. He is perpetual and multinational. He is a traveler in a world where his cultural passports are his own world.
I can feel the gift because I was born to be an Aegean, Mykonean woman. Because the power of my work has light in any of the additional training I get.
On the frame of my works exhibited here, there lives a chaos arranged by geometry in the same way as it lives in Mykonos. Realism is the faces of the people, their eyes. Expressionism is their movements, the muscles of the faces. Composition is in the arrangement of different worlds and styles.
One can see in the style of my work elements of realism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism, etc., depending on what a specific work of art wants signify. All these coexist democratically, they simply do not disturb, exactly as the passing of a medley of races on my island does not disturb at all. The actions taking place in my works are a daily figure, with an expressive face, decorated with funeral ornament symbols that spot a custom, a daily habit, which creates a hole in what we call time, since it is finally both modern and ancient. The clear shadows, which are cast only in countries where the sun shines brightly in order for gods to rest, give light to thought and philosophy. Has there been any Peter Pan that without his shadow?
One will meet Mykonos in these works of mine, with all that is happening in the time made by man, in order for him to be seen under gods and demigods .