Katerina Mertzani

Ground-less Records

4 – 29 Jun 2019 Athens CURATED BY Yiannis Bolis

A New Cave, 2018,
acrylics & collage on paper,
72 x 71 cm

“In my present work I focus mostly on deleting, rather than on writing”, says Katerina Mertzani, explaining her new project, Ground-less Records. “I want to create visual false memories. Reversing shapes, colours and positions, I convert landscapes, whose place is in the memory, into utopias that must find their place in memory; if such utopias do find a place in memory, that must mean they are going to last in time. So, in order to embrace this possibility, I blur parts of my natural recollection. However, I never really delete. Overlaying with semi-transparent, iridescent colours, I leave the first picture half-visible under a ground-less coating. And with interference colours I create an ambivalent or multi-faceted viewing. With each subsequent layer, I give the viewer the chance to “savour” the visual stages the project has gone through or, if you like, I create a kind of visual time. When I paint in layers using luxurious, shiny colours, it is as if I adorn or honour time itself, I declare it luxurious whatever its content may have been. In this project, I keep working on an idea that has been nagging me for some time now: on how can anyone, combining genuine, traditional luxury with cheap, pop glamour, create for themselves a personal, more or less utopian space where they move and act. The conscious combination of luxurious and cheap products in our lives today has pushed the so-called kitsch beyond its boundaries and has left everyone with unlimited possibilities for an absolutely personal stylisation.”

False Memory 1, 2018,
acrylics on canvas,
110 x 100 cm

Katerina Mertzani's art, by personal development and constant experimentation, confirms her expressive power and truth, her originality and poetry, her consistency and coherence in the quest for form. Her compositions renegotiate, in a modern way, the issues of abstraction and painting as process; they focus on purely artistic values and the function of colour; they capture energy and incorporate the “intrinsic”; they reveal a constant to-and-froing between order and disorder, discipline and instinct, strictness and spontaneity. Colour specks and forms construct the painting surface, develop freely, contradict, overlay or penetrate each other, creating a multidimensional field of transfigurations, transformations and “ground-less records”. Relying, as she says herself, on the way the work itself guides her, without any drafts or initial calculations, Mertzani invests in randomness,in the freedom of gesture as automated mental manifestation. Although her works give the impression of an intentional shapelessness,they include and reveal the existence of an internal rhythm which holds together and brings balance to the whole. They are pictures of another dimension, a “place” seen from above, a constantly changing and moving landscape – a reality that comes from the subconscious, the background, the experiences and emotional states of their creator, depicting her vital relationship with the world. They are pictures that emerge and impose themselves with their aesthetics, always referring to something more than the obvious, always addressing and communicating, as they try to insinuate some truth about the course of time and the circle of life.