Black ink, like the dark blood of a poetic sacrifice, engraves symbolic motives on innocent surfaces, like a personal tribute of honor. Women… Naked women, “parted” in two, black and white, split, with arms up in the air and hair disheveled… Women mothers, women alone… Women that search, that don’t talk anymore, that don’t talk yet. Women in movement. Still, closed female forms. Female shapes. “Linear Women” within a frame. And Elia Iliadi walks among them…
We, in our turn, follow the imprinted paths of her imagination. They lead us to the free country where the boundaries of the descriptive detail evaporate to become female smell. Elia holds the key of the “Essential Box”. The one that doesn’t keep the expensive perfumes and the golden fandangles. The Box-bomb that scares the suspicious, angers the jealous, enrages the tyrants. The Box where is kept, like a treasure, the stolen elixir “Be Yourself” and the flame that reduces to ashes the incomplete chart of the traditional, “natural”, “biological” female avenue.
Elia’s simple, black and white compositions that marginally refer to modern sacred Icons, whisper metaphoric thanks. A visual thank you to her unknown friends who, with a painful mental “exercise”, have surpassed every dead-end to enlarge their field of existence. Women-heroines, heroic Women. Inspired, enlightened… Elia is grateful: “If I can paint today, I owe it to all these women that have struggled so that we can now enter the School of Fine Arts, have a right to keep a studio and to organize exhibitions without been persecuted. So that we are not obliged to choose either white or black”.
For these paintings she did not need any colors. They were present in her previous work, but, for the time being, they are absent, letting textures play their role. “I was so interested by the theme, that colors were unnecessary. Besides, there is color in drawing. Every color is contained in white and black, light and darkness”. Likewise, Bergman colors in the screen, with the intense light, his rebellious black and white Monica, a free creature, decisive, uncompromised, and deeply feminine.
Elia’s lines flow sharp, strong, firm, like the decisiveness that shines permanently in her eyes. Like the tone of her voice. Like the ink she uses, which can not be erased. The figure either emerges immediately, or is torn to pieces with no second chance. Thus, we become witnesses of another struggle. An artistic risk. Which exposes the artist to the danger of loosing the essential charm, the expressive flight and the creative need. “Of course, in order to achieve what you have now in front of your eyes, I have done five hundred studies! Basically, I know what I seek, the synthesis that I desire”. But all this requires absolute control, like the one that possesses the dancer when he executes a difficult choreography and, although he knows it by heart, is afraid to betray it.
In her “choreography” Elia ignores the third dimension, obliging our eyes to embrace it with the first look. Breast, eye, hand, head, all, in the same time, emit their voices like signals. There are times when naked trees can be heard. Their dead leaves fly, following the birds, in order to paint, here and there, the sky…
Those various sharp lines into the empty “theater” of a page -the branches, the movements, the hair, the expressions…- seem, all together and from afar, like small stars that keep alight traces of images, familiar to all of us… Small fragile lamps of collective memory made of paper.
Marina Kanakaki
Art Historian – Museologist