Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki is the painter of movement, tension and spiritedness (“thymos”).

She says, “…image is the conception of a moment. The form comes back through the procedure that each individual chooses to use as a semiotic symbol.”

What is it that converts the “conception of a moment” into “the expression of eternity”? Only talent. Mina is really talented and T.S. Eliot’s verse “The still point of the moving world” defines her art and, generally, the meaning of art.

Each time that I was watching her paintings in the “Melina Merkouri room” at “Eleftherios Venizelos airport” I was feeling charged with a power that was making my flight more relaxing. This power along with her excellent technique, the sumptuous colours of her paintings, as well as the way she coordinates movement in the absolute stillness of a painting, were elements that always made me feel completely astonished as I realized the “explosion of the power flow” which is contained in the painter’s DNA.

Her “ports” make you willing to travel, her “cars” make you willing to take part in “Formula 1 race”, her “sport’s themes” make you feel sorry that you cannot take part in sport events across the globe.

“I believe”, she says, “there are two components that characterize my work: the determined design where the composition structure is based, and the tension of colour that follows this composition in a gestual style”. Further on she adds: “design is the result of colour”. The most important part of this sentence is the term, “in a gestual style”.

There are writers who write directly on the PC and others, like me, that write by hand. This is why the expression, ‘in a gestual style” is very much me as I think physical participation in the actual act of creation is what offers a “psychosomatic” feature or ,as the artist says, “a psychograph” - namely a chart of one’s psychological traits.

Summing up, I would like to underline that what counts most for an artist is recognisability, before even seeing the signature. No matter where I see Mina’s paintings, by themselves or among others, I can recognize them from afar and in an era of simulation, this “authenticity” is all that matters.

Vassilis Vassilikos