Mantalina Psoma

In Between

23 Apr – 11 Jun 2016 Trikala

Mantalina Psoma presents her personal exhibition. The exhibition consists of works of art she has produced the last two years. The puzzling title of the exhibition “In Between” encloses the semantic and pictorial speculation of Psoma’s paintings. The figures of her works move ‘in between’ the realistic and the non realistic world. She uses realistic depictions as a representational medium so that she subsequently gives her personal version of the image, which hides the ‘unreal’ behind its apparent reading. In fact, she uses eloquently familiar pictographic codes, simply to transcend to other fictional realities. Even the human faces in her works, though attributed in a non realistic way, are charged with surrealistic naturalness and appear almost eerie. Besides, just by seeing the paintings it is obvious that Psoma’s representations are not characterized by their photographic attribution but by a subtle ‘transcendent’ property whose molding conception moves in between its seeming existence and non-materiality.

Dark Room,
oil on canvas,
110 x 150 cm, 2016

Her works have a peculiar realistic identity and an intense silence in the surrounding atmosphere, thus penetrating the viewer’s inner world and evoking images that identify with familiar experiences or personal sentimental intensity.

Good Girl II,
oil on canvas,
150 x 180 cm, 2014

Her writing rivets us because through the material world that is presented she elevates the immaterial aspect of it letting the attendee free to appropriate her painted narrations and transform them into their own images. The vivacity her paintings vent, though diligently hidden behind the multiple misleading meanings of her works, is diffuse. Her visual game plays ‘in between’ the familiar and the unfamiliar, the time and no time, the material and non material and virtually transfers the viewers to the depicted surroundings instead of imposing the images of the works on them. This is her visual identity: the magic feeling that is achieved through the fictitious realistic attribution of her iconographic references.