Artist´s statement

Technology has the tendency to universalize information, whether a news report, a scientific discovery, a poem, an image, or a even warm "hello" through the email.  As a result, the disparities among people around the globe are diminishing gradually, thus shaping a more homogeneous and sharing future.  Nevertheless this transition that modern culture is undergoing so rapidly is a huge leap from the past, a movement into the unknown, a metamorphosis of the human spirit into something new not yet definable. No evocation of history, no points of reference.  An unfolding that no matter how dynamic, challenging or exciting, is a confusing and frightening process as well. Gradually the distinct lines that have always bordered virtual and animate reality are becoming blurred and diffuse.

It is not clear yet, what role precisely is being ascribed to the “ machines” of today. Whether they imitate humans or extend human function or begin to take over, one thing is certain, silicon devices and man are acquiring a very intimate relationship. Through this union we redefine ourselves, accommodating each other in a new cultural truth. Computers, an artifact of human intellectual progress, offer us a make-believe world, where via software and interfaces we obtain a vast control and even intangible entities such as light can be tamed or subjugated.

I like to think of my images as pure conduits of light. As mystic windows to dreams of flammable colors and intense, fiery heat. Throughout human history, from our most distant past to our present days, light has been identified as a symbol of safety, salvation, of good, beauty, God, virtue or survival, hearth, warmth etc. For me, it is not only a powerful metaphor of life but life itself. I have always been seeking a way to infuse effectively, a dynamic luminescence and transparency into my paintings. The traditional mediums (with which I have been trained to work), oils, canvas, paper, charcoal etc. were inadequate for my pursuit. Too matted, too opaque, too corporeal. I needed images flooded, penetrated by light. Transparent and selfglowing.

Some time ago, despite my traditional training in arts I decided to experiment with "the machine".  I could not resist the mesmerizing challenge of the new art-creating potential and foremost the "new illuminated canvas", the transparency and intensity of light-made pigments, the crisscrossing of the phosphors on the screen :-)

My work can be in a way described as an allegory of the continuously fragmenting modern culture.

Heteroclite images and disconnected events are subjected to all-manner processing, undergoing changes and reinterpreting themselves into a transcending new reality. In my paintings there is a deliberate absence of horizon, an allusion to something that already is there, but not yet to be seen. There is also no confining ordering perspective, but rather a shifting one. The shapes, multiplexed as they are, do not restrict or dominate each other in some predefined hierarchy. Spots, lines, zones of color, numerous hues flexing back and forth, move impulsively in an "elastic space".

I try to make my pictures "aware" of a contemporary cosmos, split into numerous tiny frames (so often charged with blurry sensory and conceptual stimuli ), in which not everything (at first glance anyway) is seen or contemplated.  But at the same time, they take up a task to tell amusing tales of bright visions and hopeful colors, of little places within ourselves where impossible relations are always possible, such as Leonardo's faces, Isis and a slice of brain transformed together into a retreat of magical landscapes, mythical-like creatures...Places where nostalgia for things of the past takes hold, evoking history.

I like to think of my images as a discourse between the human domain and that of the machine. They are conceived and guided by my emotions and thoughts but constituted by us both.  After all, while created they have no real substance -- they are entities hovering between the material and immaterial, algorithms dissolved into light and back to bits and bytes.

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© 2000 by Yanna Logothetis