Exuberant in the extreme, the paintings created by Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki truly pulsate with life. Profoundly imbued with an ineffable energy, they react against any sterile classification and pedantic inclusion in specific trends, precisely because they 'are', and do not merely project themselves as, self-sufficient.
This is a property which applies to all the creations of her career up to the present, as her cars and her formulas, her ships and her seas, the nervy bodies of her athletes, her succulent still-lifes - 'still' only in name - convey to us.

Mina, inductively cultivating inspiration and the twins of colour and composition inseparable in her work, through a repertoire of subjects, succeeds not only in resisting but in transcending the 'challenge' which she sets herself: to renew, constantly and from within, her expression in art, remodelling, in essence, her fundamental stimulus. And always depending upon the 'atmosphere' which the super-sensitivity of the artist captures in full.

Mina's gesture itself, over and above the par excellence vibrant colour and the mobile, nervous composition achieved by means of it, is metaphysical. This is a gesture directly bound up with the fundamental principles which distinguish the soul of this noteworthy painter.

Endowed with a charismatic capability which stems from her psychic 'ballast', the artist succeeds in penetrating to the innermost parts of the subject which moves her, to identify in it exclusively and then to reshape/render the very 'soul' of the primary nucleus of her stimulus in each case. More specifically: we are speaking of that nucleus which, identified with the very DMA of the stimulus which each time 'challenges' the artist's sensibility, activates the essence of each of her creations in a constant diapason.

This diapason, as it defines the work as a 'bridge', or rather as an umbilical cord, between the artist and the beholder, provides the latter on each occasion not merely with a visual impression, but with an experience.

This experience, impervious to time, enriches us not only visually, but also in the soul with its unseen but very real metaphysical identity - an identity which is due to the charisma which the artist possesses in conveying the unseen through the visible and vice versa. This is precisely because she is capable, through dramatic antitheses and the tension which these determine - and not only through a passive observation - of permeating to the penetralia of her stimulus which challenges jointly her imagination and psychological make-up.

The grapes, the quinces, the apples, the lemons in her vital compositions, which are wronged by the description of 'still lifes', are exuberant and metaphysical ; they are projected as charismatic codes of a metaphysical semiotics, directly bound up with the pulse of life, a pulse linked with the energy determined by the universe.

As a charismatic 'fellow-worker', the colour here captures, models and remodels even the most infinitesimal - but always significant - detail in a metaphysical image. This is an image without bounds, so that it evolves without restriction before our eyes and before our soul; an image which, however often we look at it, we shall never exhaust in a reading/analysis; an image which changes constantly to be TRANSFORMED BY ITS OWN POWERS into an extrapolation of the natural state of affairs, into a metaphysical experience.

And from what is essentially a poetic creation, each of the artist's compositions transfuses into us something substantive from the energy which imbues creation in the broadest sense of the term.