In Anna Maria Tsakali’s maiden exhibition in Cyprus, the gallery of Stand in Line – Art Space acquires the painter’s special “microclimate”. The artist’s presence in the contemporary art world is shared between Paris and Athens, where she lives and works, serving a painting tradition with deep roots with a contemporary perspective. During her tenure at the École des Beaux-Arts workshop, under the renowned teacher Leonardo Cremonini, she first developed the basic elements of perceptual painting and armed herself with the necessary self-confidence at a time when painting was in danger of being overshadowed by installations and media images. “If Greece was my mother, Paris was my father. They both raised me. In Paris, I shaped my Greek sensitivity, getting to know Greece anew and loving it more deeply. It is the place where I fell in love with painting, where I overcame my habits and opened my eyes to the world. In Paris I became a painter,” she explains.
I do not know if it has been noted by foreign scholars of her work, nor whether she herself was aware of it, but in the halls of the great museums of Paris Tsakali had another, slow-burning but fruitful tenure. In the works of the great and the anonymous masters of landscape painting with an emphasis on nature, she found, outside of eras and stylistic trends, a thematic richness that she has systematically cultivated over the last three decades: the flower.
In the history of works, if these are indeed great works of art, the meaning that is later attributed to them comes from them themselves. It is the work itself that has opened the horizon like a seed, through which it will appear at some other time in the future; this same work is transformed and becomes its continuation. In the painted flower, this does not happen. Six centuries after the “solutions” provided by the Renaissance, it remains always new in our eyes and requires us to seek it not once in our lifetime, but for an entire life. Each flower involuntarily “idealizes” an era and with this function it subsequently participates in the aestheticization not only of the “then” time, but also of the “present” time.
The paradox is that in flowers Tsakali is attracted to the ephemerality of life. Not only because they evoke time, but because of the thoughts and reactions they activate, flowers by their nature contain the tragic, a beauty that converses with death. In the fragile condition of the flower – in life and the inevitable decay that follows it – Tsakali sees a metaphor for human existence, which she strives to “save” in the land of painting. For the painter, flowers speak of the battle with death, while maintaining their beauty. It is her own way of speaking about the power of life. From this point of view, the flower becomes a “memento mori”, since the memory of its final end, no matter how much it is chased away, creeps in as inescapable. However, whether, depending on the eras and the different schools, one clings more to the obvious movement or to the monumental, painting when it is great does not seek the external characteristics of movement, but its secret cryptographic signs. And this is what binds Tsakali to the great masters.
