Opposite to Cezanne, the great deconstructor and reconstructor of the visible order, in the beginning of the twentieth century modernity in art affirms itself through the necessity to liberate, using sign and gesture, the psychic pulse of the artist.

An artist who has never had the opportunity so far to reveal the flagrance of his own action nor to impose hic et nunc the trace of his existence and of his presence in the world.

From Die Brücke to De Kooning, Pollock and Cobra, but also with metropolitan writers, history is always the same, and takes a name that few other times appears to be so relevant to a certain stimmung in art: expressionism, which in substance means “transferring”, from inside out, in a centrifugal direction –namely in the opposite direction from what it has been the practice of impressionism- an impulse of the subconscious. It is about expelling an emotional situation meant at a visual level to be translated in a trauma, in a paroxystic deformation of reality and consequently of the image that is being translated up to the point of denying it and even up to the point of going “beyond it”. Things couldn’t be any different if we consider the course of this impulse.

The work of Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki is inscribed, at least as regards its poetic dimension, in what remains a constant for the aesthetic feeling of all times, before even becoming a historic tendency.

My point is that the connotation existing in the search of this Athenian artist is vitality that becomes the very condition of her pictorial language. This has always been the case. Moreover, her thematic repertory, which is very broad and versatile- and equally efficient when it is either about nature, human figures or mechanics and technology- it always has to comply with the same energetic drive.

In other words for Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki, emotion is not limited to the role of pretext or the very origin of the creative act. On the contrary, it feeds the latter along its course, and it “infects” it with all its vibrations and snaps, even with its excesses, becoming a sort of ingredient - the “material” of the whole painting procedure.

The style itself – I am referring to the nervous and broken brushwork, to the extreme freedom of sign that trespasses in dripping up to the violent explosions of pure pigment - becomes, in short, just like in an ideographical alphabet , which is the “form” and “content” of Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki’s work. This is where we can find the perfect equivalence between signifiant and signifié that Ferdinand de Saussure has recognized as the only and true aim of art. We shouldn’t forget that such overlapping puts in a situation of accusation the principle that in art discriminates figurative language from informal, disavowing its theoretical inconsistency.

My approach to Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki’s painting is based on this fundamental thought. The same thought that I could have had regarding her passions and her cultural debts, the influence of which, even if indirect, hidden or subconscious, has left its traces. This is the other important origin of her work.

We should underline, in passing, that we are in the climate of historic informality, in an atmosphere of a “lyrical abstraction” which developed around the middle of the last century. A movement where sign gestuality originates from a certain liberatory ύβρις relying therefore on irrational stimulus and supporting the irresistible inventive necessity of the artist. The creative gesture and the aesthetic result become, I have to repeat, an event of absolute simultaneity free from any gaps or time breaks. To sum up, what we see on the canvas is a phenomenon at the state of immanence, it’s the manifestation of a moment during its happening. I am not only thinking about the already mentioned Pollock and De Kooning, but also about Sam Francis, Hartung and Kline and above all about Mathieu and the signs he uses which are an immediate translation of reality and at the same time a “writing” that reveals the ultimate and most profound essence of the depicted subject.

This painting finds its most authentic sense precisely between objective reality- which anyway Mina would never renounce- and the most elevated dynamic synthesis. The artist depicts objects drawn from the industrial and urban habitat - like the port cranes and cars - that are included in the repertory of this exhibition and she is not limited in describing nor in arguing a particular aspect of our everyday life. She is rather intending to make visible the “abstract” that these images include inside their unequivocal, tautological pictorial expression.

In other words it’s not a question of judging the painting of Mina Papatheodorou-Vayraki on the basis of an objective point of reference from which she draws her inspiration (which after all is only a metaphor of our times and nothing more than that) but decoding it in its complex, and very rich structural detail which should be evaluated in terms of an absolute autoreference. I think that not ‘reading’ her painting using this key, would be a major mistake.

After all, it is as if the artist is challenging the evidence of vision, in what her fluid, wide brushwork allows running and “sedimenting” on the canvas surface. It is a pictorial gesture that is always seeking large dimensions, even when space is physically limited.

Everything in Mina’s work is being “thought” on this large scale. This is what we see in the emaciated silhouettes of the cranes traced and sketched on a background of yellow and silver and also in the race cars whose darting design look as if it is dilating itself in a sort of visual deflagration, where the whole tension is revealed as well as the outburst and the virtual movement. It is a dynamism which involves also the colour that the artist handles in a audacious and often dissonant way, colour always becomes the “accomplice” of sign and its excitement.

In other words the semiotic equation of Ferdinand de Saussure ends up by finding in Mina Papatheodorou Valyraki’s work it’s most perfect confirmation.

GUILIANO SERAFINI