Maria Giannakaki’s painting, associative and torrential, captivates and deeply moves. It grabs your gaze – with its radiant colors, outlines, erasures, rewrites, gaps – and throws you into a sea of emotions and thoughts. It resembles a river born of contrasting shapes: ink and color, sensitivity and boldness, a sample of traditional Chinese painting in which she has served and truly innovated, because she has firmly assimilated it into her own, personal style.
In her latest artistic harvest, she travels to Cyprus with 17 portraits. The largest work in terms of dimensions, entitled “Girl with Baskets and Toys,” results from a multifaceted composition, where figures scattered in a vertical and horizontal arrangement on the canvas star. At its center, the painter chooses to appear as a child locked in a basket, without a color basis, like an erased memory kept alive by a toy in her hands. “When I was little, I had a mania for toys and dolls,” she says, and unfolds a dreamlike scenario between memory and childhood fear (where a gypsy woman became a terror in her childhood eyes when she passed through the neighborhoods and advertised the goods with baskets). The remaining figures are not real in the sense of realistic rendering, but are also transferred from the grooves of imagination or a lost memory that embodies color. “All together they make the work of being me, this is my childhood world,” she confesses and gives one of her most personal compositions, a profound self-portrait. In this peculiar self-portrait, Giannakaki leaves the erotic touch that had occupied her in the previous section of her works and penetrates into something exiled and out of place: the touch of memory. There is no linear juxtaposition and organization of the faces into main or secondary. The narrative flows between the figures, highlighting the idea that these are aspects of the same consciousness. Her painting style refers to Virginia Woolf’s method, which became known in literature as “stream-of-consciousness.” With the stream of consciousness, the author achieved in her writing a monologue of associations, narrative fragments that have no clear beginning and end, but follow an internal time that oscillates, like dreams. In this way, she managed to reveal the emotional “landscape” of her heroes (interwoven with her own) and to meet the reader’s world.
Giannakaki, without having this in mind at all, meets Woolf in her means and ends. Within the work itself, she searches, in places, for different qualities, sometimes with ink, sometimes with spray, sometimes preserving and sometimes erasing the outlines, covering - revealing, fragmenting - unifying, following the reversal of the setting from a different perspective (as the work can also be seen from the side), in order to retrieve the radically different dimension, to reveal the psyche of the person through its various aspects. It is like an inner monologue, without clear rules, that comes to the surface through fleeting images and eternal transformations.
Only in the children that she renders in small canvases, is the painter not suggestive. She puts years into her paintings and draws their clean and soft lines, their faces, their hands, the transparencies on the skin and of course their world. Personally, I believe that Giannakaki is an unrivaled craftswoman in the extremely demanding child portrait. The “flowers of goodness”, as she calls her children, have their own painting ethos, that is, they are not confused with anything that reflects any affinity with a creator from today or the past.
