LUIS GONZALES ROBLES
(Former Director of the Spanish Museum of Modern Art in Madrid Member of the A.I.C.A)
   

It is satisfying to a critic to analyse a work of art of which all the elements correspond to a complete coherence, an aesthetic principle I have always upheld during the entire course of my long professional career.

In the present instance, Mina Papatheodorou directs the morphological composition of her work basing herself on the potentiality of each of the elements, which appear and intervene immediately and with an inherent dynamism of an intensely expressive character, reflecting a dynamic activity which is suggested and which emerges from the quality of her material. Thus is created the air and expression of the volumes which oppose and complement each other producing a marvellous effect in a developing form which is dominated by the composition and the image. In this manner, any fortuitous environment is abolished and the space is invaded by a masterful symbolic character of a vigorous pictorial style - free traces, full of light and colour, which mix and blend in a dramatic way. Moreover, her creations are dramatic, as they possess a plenitude which is triumphantly novel, in connection with the traditional sense of the hierarchical order of values. The colours which are achieved on the level surfaces possess an explosive intensity, delighting in orderly contrasts, following an austere scale in what, in speaking of a musical piece, we would call the tonality of the work.

I repeat, the colour - bright and correctly applied - is complemented by the spots of painting. Colour and drawing constitute the two constants of her work. Colour transcends the natural in order to attain the limits of the symbolic, as though opening a liberating road and one of indispensable renewal. Mina Papatheodorou tends by intuition towards a wild simplicity, but towards a simplicity full of expression, where the pauses play a capital role. This style is simultaneously lyrical and descriptive.

With the dominating brushstrokes - I would almost dare to call them aggressive - her work, inundated with light and life, is able to speak with her own spontaneous voice, which bursts out replete with the radiance of that bright Mediterranean sun, which unites us in a common perception of life.