Yannis Bolis, Art historian

In Ariadne Vitastali’s painting compositions and designs, callousness coexists and directly converses with sensitivity, melancholy with the internality of alienation, vitality with tension, an ironic view with a sense of humour. The artist manages her obsessions, and her inspirations are easily detectable, covering a broad range of influences, from pop art and trash to bad painting, while her themes are derived mostly from movies, television series or comics heroes.

In her work, Sid and Nancy (from the Alex Cox biopic) meet Clint Eastwood from his spaghetti western period, the perennially smiling Buda meets Isabella Rossellini from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Elizabeth Taylor meets a wounded King Kong at the top of the Empire State Building, superheroine Jessica Jones from the Marvel universe meets African-American Olympic champion Gabby Douglas in her Barbie version… Throughout her work, the starting point is either a word or phrase, derived from literature, a screenplay or the lyrics of a song; a word or phrase that is evocative, leading to the formation of the image and, in most cases (after the image has been rendered),eventually integrated in the image in the form of a piece of writing or a fragment from a personal diary – a reference and annotation.

Her unconventional, subversive spirit and confessional predilection reveal her vital relationship with the world, often taking on roles or identifying herself with the heroes of her imagery. An entire world, familiar but also ambiguous and bewildering, emerges as an extension of reality, experiences and memory, a world that is open to different approaches and interpretations, a surprising, original and inventive scenery. The compositions of Ariadne Vitastali confront her personal truths, raise existential questions about life –its discords, impasses, wounds, illusions and entrapments – referring in a critical, allusive manner to political and social issues, commenting on the “glamorous” world of showbusiness, on gender identities, on male and female roles and the certainties and stereotypical perceptions that surround them; meanwhile, her compositions also talk about frustrated love, about lost or failed expectations, about forgotten promises, about returning to happier days (which may have never existed), about the moments of a contrived bliss. Her compositions go well beyond their obvious sources, evolving in direct correlation to mental-emotional manifestations and experiential situations, revealing an inner approach and interpretation of the human condition.

Ariadni Vitastali’s Variations in Abstraction

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos

With colorful, gestural abstract forms, exuberantly captured through diverse emotions, conceptual word-games and expressive brushstrokes, Ariadne Vitastali’s paintings are a unique evolution of the visual tradition of theNorthwest School Abstraction. Full of spontaneous markings of color tones with melodic lines as seen in Abstraction Lyrique, or automatist subconscious gestures, similar to Action Painting and finally gentle calligraphic movements reminiscent of the techniques of the American painter Mark Tobey, her neo-expressionist images can be formally compared to the radical experiments ofthe Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning.​​​​

Willem de Kooning believed about his abstract painting that «It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it…. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. … It [painting Woman, Ι] did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light – I put it in the center of the canvas because there was no reason to put it a bit on the side. So, I thought I might as well stick to the idea that it’s got two eyes, a nose and mouth and neck.». Artist statements can sometimes be misleading in that, out of a desire to control their public image artists sometimes overstate or exaggerate their statements. ​

Thus, one can safely assume that de Kooning’s work and by extension Vitasatali’s were very meticulously planned, whilst both artists preciselyconsidered the formal aspects of their compositions before their artistic execution in order to create a paradoxical sort of accidental perfection. Morphologically this can be confirmed by a careful examination of their artworks. De Kooning saved and cut-out various images of women from popular presses, something that demonstrates forethought and planning, while their placement also illustrates pre-planning and strategy as alsoVitastali’s carefully chosen compositional designs. In fact, Vitastali’scompositions are often diagonally situated causing the eye to be active according to Expressionist principles.

Although Vitastali’s recent works are abstract, her oeuvre straddles the categories between abstract and abstracted, in that her non-relational images maintain some recognizable motifs. As seen in several 2022-2023 Untitledpaintings, the artist uses abstracted modes in order to treat subjects with a feminist bent while depicting mythological heroines. One such painting is Untitled III, 2023 -wherein a figure is seen tumbling backwards into a chasm-that can be read in terms of the Demeter legend. When Persephone, her daughter was abducted by Hades the God of the underworld, Demeter went to Hades to seek her out, and her absence caused a famine on earth. To Vitastali’s predecessors -the American Abstract Expressionists- myth was also important informing the work of William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. These artists including Vitastali, used a semi-representational or abstracted style in their early careers later becoming increasingly abstract.

The term “abstract” and its varying degrees, carries a whole range of associations and descriptions. German-born American artist and museum founder, Hilla von Rebay, used the term gegenstandlos (to describe her abstract painting), which American artists later mistranslated as “objectlesspainting.” Rebay who associated her visual production with “pure” music, like Kandinsky, believed that art should be externalized from the inner cosmos of the artist and not from a simple abstraction of external nature. This particularidea paradoxically already existed in the Christian aesthetics of the Middle Ages and Scholasticism and was quite widespread until the Renaissance and Mannerism. The artist-craftsman was not supposed to simply copy, or mimic the material world, but instead to reflect within his inner psyche, the divine “ideas” that constitute a higher dimension than world of phenomena or changing space-time.​​​​​​​

Erwin Panofsky in his book Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, specifically wrote that the work of art “far from being merely derived from the creations of nature and transferred to the work of art by a simple act of copying, lives in the mind of the artist himself and is directly translated by him into matter.”Similarly, modern abstract painting rejected the Platonic concept of art as “mimesis” and attempted to return to a more primal state of art, i.e. to a non-representational art, where the artist expresses an inner and intuitive world-picture (Weltbild) of the external reality -or as Rebay meant the word gegenstandlos as “subjective”. The art theorist Wilhelm Worringer also believed that primitive art is par excellence a “pure, geometric and abstract” art, where the subject unconsciously tried to escape the eternal flux of the varying phenomena of the outer world.​​​​​​

As Kant believed, despite all the avant-garde’s radical convictions about an abstract art of the future, abstract art essentially managed to return to a primordial side of pictorial art, where the inner world of the human psychewith all its violent permutations is no longer separated from an inaccessible rift in the external world. But instead, through abstract art (as well as music), the numinous phantasmagorias of the soul are translated externally without the need to appropriate a material form, or an external image. They should instead be expressed through a kind of formal “formlessness”, in which theyvisually diffuse without the metaphorical clothing of a phenomenal world. Thus, the Kantian separation of the thing-in-itself (i.e. the noumenon) and ephemeral phenomena no longer exists and the abstract artist as a new kind of shaman, or magician directly externalizes his immaterial and aniconicthoughts-feelings into objective reality, restoring thus a long-gone universal communication for humanity, despite linguistic, ethnic and cultural differencesamong civilizations. The imaginal (and also formless) medium of the abstract artist here manifests itself as a universal language of specific moods (Stimmungen) or even archetypical experiences, which every human, as CarlJung strongly affirmed, everywhere in the globe subliminally shares.​

Likewise, Vitastali’s complex, yet simultaneously time-minimal works externalize the boundary between abstraction and figurative painting. Between the dreamlike masses of pure color, anthropomorphic figures and illusory forms can be discerned, which blend together within the streams of discrete colorfulness. Thus, different fragments of lost forms are revived in an elaborate, but simple mosaic of lively hues, where the unconscious tendencies of an inner world are imprinted like living spots on the white paper, while morphic modulations and color-form sketches recreate the subliminal tones of a lyrical locus of abstract images. Her present paintings are abstracted, representing as such an engagement with her earlier mode of working, which rigorously marks her maturity as an artist.  ​​​

As Ariadni Vitastali writes in her statement about her new works “the painting elements of form, color, gesture, line, as also fragments of phrases, or simply words, define the worked surface as abstract elements, insinuating a glimpse view of a momentary and subjective reality”.

Beyond Mythology: The Art of Ariadni Vitastali

Art on Paper, New York

September 7 – 10, 2023 styles

Reviewed by Robert C. Morgan

The work of the Greek Hellenic artist Ariadni Vitastali, recently shown at Donopoulos IFA Gallery, Art on Paper in New York City, reveals a curious form of abstraction that exceeds normative painting. Her unlikely choice of materials for these works includes ink, graphite, colored pencils, erasures, and oil sticks. They are often placed together throughout the space of the paper, thereby giving her works a sudden evocation of draftsmanship, eliciting our sense of expertise.

Describing these paintings presents a modest challenge given that Vitastali found her direction of work through various approaches to abstraction taken from the New York School in the late 1940s, evolving steadily into the early 1970s. What came into being was her most recent style of abstraction that went beyond predetermined methods towards a more deeply personalized means. Here, Vitastali’s forms gradually lost their painterly likenesses to maintain an appearance of suspension. The paintings from 2023 focus on abstraction with elements of figuration. In essence, her paintings are generally absent from contrivance, whereupon they are given over to markings that occasionally revert to laxity. For the most part, viewers are free to guess what these abstractions mean or how we might come to terms with their meanings in the future.

Vitastali’s works are generally titled “Untitled” (2022 / 2023), each of which holds a sense of partial completion in a manner given to highlights suggesting innocence. It would be as if the space of the work had lost itself even as it presumably functioned within a space reserved for habitation. Rather than coming from a method drawn on the edge of density, the space of these drawings and/or paintings separates into a kind of mental playground asking for our attention from one “Untitled” moment to the next.

In an early work titled 1993, the word “Compress” is placed beside an acquatint and dry point print, measuring 18 x 16.”  In another work, an ink smudge includes a linear sketch of a book.  In a third work, linear forms are suspended in an abstract relationship to one another. Each of the three works – dated 1993 – function in a tripartite configuration. The lightness of these works is often difficult to read either within or beyond possible forms of meaning, even

as they would appear to play a distinct role within a larger composition.

In other early works from 1995, a linear ink drawing reads as a jumbling of unkept hair adjacent to a work, suggesting an ink painting simultaneously appearing wet and dry. The black and whiteness of these works appear close to animal and vegetable elements, wherein the colors are brightly shown despite their modest scale. They read as purple, red, green, and yellow. Eventually, these colors will proliferate in her paintings from 2023, as they were presented during the Art on Paper exhibition.

Further, these primary colors transform their space into another complex work wherein an intense yellow has been poured against a dark green square. In addition, there is an evenly painted blue backdrop with a configuration of two black creatures seemingly at odds with one another. The content of their struggle is difficult to surmise. Their forms are caught in a skirmish, apparently locked into a visual duality, struggling to let go. Together, they constitute a visual coherence combined with a spatial energy that lends itself to the scope of our fascination.

Vitastali’s abstractions hold a certain fascination on many levels.  If I were to compare her work with another artist, it would be that of the American artist Cy Twombly. This is not to say they appear on the same level. Rather, it is to suggest that the indirectness of their space and their ability to mark the surface accordingly suggests a common thought process. Even so,

their differences are apparent in the sense that Vitastali’s reductive applications are worthy of note. It is tempting to say that her markings are restrained, which is untrue. She is a painter with the ability to mark aggressively and also with incredible calm.

The recent “Untitled” (2023) paintings by Vitastali might be understood as divisions between gatherings and figurations, both painted from the perspective of abstraction. In addition to ink, we read primaries and secondaries, which include fleshy pinks and browns.

The references may suggest mythologies anywhere from El Tauro to Leda and the Swan, but rarely, if ever, read directly. The formal break-up in Vitastali’s paintings is stupendous as we are invited to read her paintings as a relaxation, that is, to play literally with form, color, and space. This heart-felt visual propensity may, at times, go over the top, but only in a way that satisfies our desire for formality in painting — that is, formality as an open-minded provocation that fulfills our desire to see, think, and live.