Phases of Venus, 2022 © Ariana Papademetropoulos.
Photo by Argenis Apolinario; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery.
Papademetropoulos’ paintings transport the onlooker into another realm: the subconscious, the sacred, the magic. Her immersive landscapes shimmer with an opalescent fizz, as if some kind of transformative alchemy is taking place on the canvas. Vast exterior landscapes of the natural world are often juxtaposed with interior worlds like a conch shell or the decor of a seemingly abandoned home. Papademetropoulos believes an enclosed space can be a site or portal for transformation. It is within the solitary darkness of an oyster shell that a pearl is born.
To encounter Papademetropoulos’ work is to have a dialogue with your own subconscious. She invites you to lose your ego and become lost in the vastness of something greater than yourself: to suspend reality, to give in to the unknowable and experience the divine other realm. Her oil paintings are portals to take you to a new reality or shifted perspective. The idea of a threshold – any place or point of entering or beginning – is a symbol often used in Jungian psychoanalysis. It represents a moment of change because to enter through the metaphorical door means surrendering to a new reality. Once you cross over it, nothing is the same. The motif of a threshold can also be seen in the paintings of the prolific American artist Dorothea Tanning, who, like Papademetropoulos, was interested in the duality between the exterior and interior. Working in the mid-20th century, Tanning was immersed in, as she put it, the “limitless expanse of possibility” of painting within the surrealist genre. Whilst surrealism undoubtably holds influence for Papademetropoulos, her work can be more accurately defined as creating hyperrealistic parallel worlds that exist within a different realm to our own.