A long “journey” through time and legend, just like the midsummer afternoon heat of the old times, with illustrated classic comics and magazines.

Memory collections, with inferences, plots and happenings in constant sequence. Unconscious images are drawn out of the “dust of time” and “mix” with the aromas of the chest - of – drawers, the “checked” red blanket and the “books I’ve read” filled with sand, marks, notes, and underlined verses and paragraphs.

When I was a little girl, I used to be terrified of lightning and thunder. Right now, I’m afraid that, one day, my “books” will be “sold by the kilo”.

Aglaia Christianou

The structure of the outer and inner chaotic world and the opposite, the creative disturbance of a certain "order" characterizes the artistic creation in general. This twofold sense exists in the last series of the works of Aglaia Christianou.

ΕΝΔΟ- TERRA (IN-TERRA), inner space and land, as introspection or as a journey to the centre of the land- country or of personal space. The inner space as a unified reference to the space-mother-earth.
A search in space and time, in the vastness of the inmost. The identification with the primitive relation is associated with the archaic- mythological memory and through a circular perennial nature give shapes to images of a symbolic-imaginary field-world. The accumulation of representations specific or up in the air, with sequence or non sequence, with hints, with activation of personal traumatic experience, with inmost itineraries are raised so that the creation of plastic arts is achieved. Images of Alice in Wonderland, the wonders of soul and the lost childhood, are researched.
A very well known itinerary to Aglaia Christianou from her previous work, which she dealt with in ANIMALIA with great humour and quality, the approach to the field of the microcosm of the animals. A painless approach surface and sarcastic, that gave her the method to dare the introspection of the personal world.

The maelstrom of the subconscious and memory with the shape they appear in our dreams, are organized and arranged regularly but at the same time they are deceptive. In an attempt of a reasonable control, a geometrical climax is invented with the help real or fictitious, of the small school blackboard in order to list symbols and images of childhood and youth. The components are crossed without reasonable connection, without focusing, with anarchic shifting, with distortion of perspective, with traces of the past, that are decoded, with happenings that are spread in constant sequence and a gloomy order without constant succession. In this way artistic compositions turn up-archives of a personal search as enigmatic symbols.
At the beginning ... a small soft bed with white sheets and a child on it as the drawing of a picture and a notional spark of the narrative sequence. As the "Inner Mirror", a construction of great size, with the reshape of the old toy, the one with the revolving images (the panorama) as endoscope with revolving movements, flashbacks of the lost childhood, of the homeland, of the images of the children's world.

The great compositions with the smart themes, puns, "Bed's epic", the "Dream factory or the workshop of dreams", the "case with valuable sounds", the "communicating landscapes", the triptych "I exist in everything ... in recreation ... in full knowledge of", the "... and the inner pages emerge" and a lot of others in a similar style. Compositions of deceptive order and harmony and at the same time with the dominating and symbolic colour variety of earth's colours and with the gleam of the white components that they light up the ochre, the brown and the black as well as the mixed texture, the small structures and the embodied images, symbols. Works-games of the exacting handmade pieces of work, on the boundary of reality and imagination which the artist constructs with inventiveness, humour and playful mood in order to approach the essential.

"Symptom of feminine way of writing in its mental dimension" as Julie Christeva mentions specifically for other fields of creation. In this particular case with the artistic language that Aglaia Christianou knows how to handle. In this way the wasteland or the unknown land, which it is looked-into is presented. However it is densely populated with images-symbols polymorphous and significant.
As an open book or a youth diary where she writes down her experiences or images of a psychobiological existence, so that the roots of the things could be emerged on the surface.
Along with them the traces of the origin after the complicated experience that presupposes the labyrinth of departure and the coexistence of "I" with "other".

The inner tour is expected to be continued on the basis of the existence, in the bottom of the oceanic-vast land, which in the domination of the earthy landscape hasn't slowed up in her work, yet.
After the adventurous inner search, the painting of the images of the inexpressible is the thing to be asked for.

Chryssa Drantaki
Art Historian – Sociology of art