From the moment we first come into visual contact with the paintings of Mina Papatheodorou Valyraki, we are overwhelmed, Their large, imposing dimensions, the clear colours which describe the rapid movement, create intense pictorial forms typical of our modern, man-made environment.

The painter refers to characteristic elements of the modern world, elements recognisable in any corner of the earth; to elements such as the gigantic walls of the great cities, the preponderance of metallic technology - an indelible sign of the modern industrialised world - the motorcars, cranes and ships... Here, she uses dark blues, blacks, greys, colours of shadows, of large masses of glass, of concrete and of steel.

Her whites are blurred, greyish, stained by pollution. The light is dim, framed by the flat forms of interminable buildings. The impassable crowd of cars covers the composition with quick, sharp pictorial movements, by which are rendered their smooth, curving surfaces. Here, the yellow masses of the taxis are extended by speed.

Elsewhere, the momentary passage of some vehicle leaves its trace against the background, in lines formed by spilt colour. Without explicitly drawing the human figure in these paintings, Mina strongly suggests the human presence, in the cars, the buildings and the dense traffic. She brings us very close to the feeling created by the big urban centres.

The feeling of solitude in the midst of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. The imposing bows of freighters, the cranes reaching to the sky, and the cars are part and parcel of our immediate environment, which they themselves shape.

Inspired by these themes, the artist creates a whole series of works. The works of Mina Papatheodorou Valyraki draw their inspiration from open spaces. In the big-city landscapes, the horizon, framed by tall buildings, is closed, visibility is limited. In the cranes the horizon opens up towards the sky, a sky riddled with the assembled forms of geometrical shapes. Here, the skies occasionally take on a yellow hue or become green. This contrast with the natural cku blue.

Strongly emphasised chromatically, marks not only the presence of a composite technical world, but also of a heavy industry rooted in our reality, elements which have become inescapable parts of modern life.

From 1990 on, her works are characterised by a mixed technique. Here, colour becomes a material possessing a structural texture and takes over a large part of the composition. Placed in the foreground, it looks as though it were some material picked up off the ground, thrown there and forgotten. It is, however, a living material, found everywhere in these industrial workplaces.

It has an earthy, variegated colour, a rough texture, and sometimes a smooth one when the spatula has passed over it. It is a rough-grained, compact mass, formed by the fluctuations of colour and the lumpy texture. It is the chemical passage of time on a conglomerated amalgam, marked here and there by the tinge of an easily soluble drop of colour. With this superb plastic metaphor, Mina Papatheodorou Valyraki conveys to the viewer the dimension of the material and of the wear of time.

She also conveys the dimensions of the space in which the processes of composition and decomposition take place. These works are endowed with deep thought concerning the high aspirations and ambitions of mankind, and their relative duration. I would say that they contain a philosophic reflection on the vanity of material life.

In these works, the image of the motorcar emblematically encloses the symbolism of speed. The car seems to be on its way to explore the earthy space, driven against the atmospheric background and the dynamic force of the colours that compose it. Another emblematic figure with which the artist is concerned is the bow of a ship.

The ship expresses man's primeval effort to dominate the waters. The grand figure of the ship's bow constitutes a monument to his victory. The huge steel prow lifts its towering bulk, covering almost the entire space of the composition. Its upper part, smooth, unblemished, indestructible, stands out against the flat, intense blue of the sky, while below, on the quay, broad criss-crossing black brushstrokes and rust-coloured shades mix together, conveying a feeling of confusion and uncertainty.

The rust which appears at the point of contact, where bow and ship meet, symbolises the visible attrition in man's never-ending struggle to subjugate nature.

Mina Papatheodorou Valyraki endows her colours with a material quality. Colour acquires vitality, as it radiates the energy of the form it embodies. The pictorial gesture of the artist, completely integrated in the modern and complex expression of art, is purely personal. It is a movement in which the entire body participates and, led by the hand, expresses a memory space.
Her expression possesses a quality of lyrical freedom and a precision which is full of feeling. It is an alchemy, radiant with truth and love which emerges from her inner self and is born before our eyes.