A Geography of Limbo
 

Like the Hellenic accents evoked by his surname, the pictorial work of CORINTHIOS reminds us that art cannot do without the itinerant character of any enterprise that gives itself as an object the perilous crossing of appearances.

Since the great black birds, which in his first paintings aimed at this naturally ephemeral state of weightlessness, the art of CORINTHIOS has moved towards a more radical conception, close to an ontological stake in the material whose mystery it seeks to unravel. The journey to which we are invited testifies to the imperative need to question the persistent opacity of the living, to unearth, even to exhume this "life in the folds", on paths of high solitude.

However, let us beware of the temptation to escape from this challenge, because the obstinate exploration of this pictorial material gives us, without sparing any thought, the vision of what must be called our carnal reality. In this, CORINTHIOS' paintings go beyond the framework of a metaphorical representation of the body; they explore its very substance, in an original nudity that escapes the triviality of the anecdote...

This world in gestation goes through contradictory flows and impulses, roars with a matrix violence that keeps its nocturnal part without ever ceasing to open up to the luminous lull of an intimate continent. Such seems to me to be the risky adventure of this artist. 
Her personal genealogy predisposed her to travel. This one pursues in another form the stubborn quest for a face finally recognized.

Leslie ANAGNAN
March 1993

 

 The Dance of Bodies and Faces 

Over the years and successive stages of his artistic journey, CORINTHIOS obstinately built his home.
The inner adventure that is so strongly expressed in his canvases here takes on the emblematic value of a radical transfiguration of the pictorial material, close to the miracle of the icon, this sacred art patiently elaborated and destined to manifest the real presence of transcendence.
I use the word deliberately in order to signify that the revelation to which we are invited has at stake the body in its most concrete materiality but also in its capacity to metamorphose into a no less concrete reality, albeit of a different nature, made possible by the mediation of art.
 
In the aquatic silence of limbo, where the multitude of human figures are pressed together, a few faces emerge. The solitude of these dancers in the background is ours, however, as long as we agree to follow them in their vital impulse, in this senseless challenge to the laws of gravitation, we suddenly find ourselves lightened, carried away in a whirlwind of colours, a cascade of intense light that illuminates our intimate labyrinth.
For the work of CORINTHIOS tells us the story of all the beginnings of life leaving its folds, it tells us of the uprooting of gravity and the embarkation towards a horizon of grace.

Leslie ANAGNAN
April 1999