Ariana Papademetropolous: Balancing Heaven and Earth

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. 

In The Atmospheric River (2024) there is a threshold – a literal doorway into an austere interior of muted opulence – that has been opened and water is spilling through. But the arrival of the natural world doesn’t appear destructive, rather the benevolent seeming river flows adorned with diamante sparkles. The open doorway seems almost like an invitation to the natural or even supernatural; the artist is a host letting the abstract in. Papademetropoulos is interested in the duality of things, to strike a balance between the intangible otherworld and the tangible present. For her, the paintings are stronger this way – if the magic is shown slightly pared back it makes it more noticeable. The threshold and the flowing water are set against a restrained backdrop in white that is reminiscent of an anonymous gallery space. There is fluidity to a liminal space where nothing can be pinned down. Perhaps this idea particularly appeals to a generation who are keen to look beyond the binary of things, and to approach the space between with curiosity. 

On first glance, Papademetropoulos’ created worlds are pure magic, but there also belies a looming sense of danger. At any threshold, there is a confusing tangle of emotions from fear to excitement, dread to hope. By exploring the psychology of interior spaces, Papademetropoulos evokes not only a feeling of innocuous nostalgia but also the uncanny. There’s this ominous quality as if waking up from a dream, of trying to grasp your subconscious, but in doing so clumsily pushing it further away. In Curse of the Boys with Butterfly Tattoos (2020) an oversized turquoise iridescent bubble contains an image of a domestic space that looks like a parallel world. Despite the luxury of the interior scene enclosed within the bubble, there is an eerie quality, perhaps due to the profound paucity of people in the scene. In Espulsione dalla discoteca (2020), the dream-like quality of a lilac tinged bubble is undercut by the background of an unidentifiable house with pitch black windows. In the foreground, an opaque orange smoke billows across the canvas like a deadly pyroclastic flow. 

Growing up in Los Angeles, a city with a chequered history of esoteric artists, mystics, and cult leaders, it is easy to imagine where Papademetropoulos draws her inspiration from. Yet, when she studied at California Institute of the Arts, it was at a time where painting was not particularly fashionable or encouraged –  let alone paintings of unicorns and anthropomorphic flowers. But in the years since graduating (2012), Papademetropoulos has continued to garner a cult-like following of those seduced by her explorations into the occult. She has held solo exhibitions at spaces including Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York (2020), Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles (2021), and more recently a group exhibit at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris (2024).  

Although known primarily for being a painter, Papapdemetropoulos also creates films and installations. In 2023, she made a short film in collaboration with the Louvre in Paris called Mon Seul Désir. In the film, Papademetropoulos, repose on a lavish bed, appears to float around the grand halls of the gallery. Fantastical, and dream-like, it is as if we’re taking a tour not of the Louvre but inside Papademetropoulos’ subconscious. The film ends with her padding barefoot into the cave of a mythological Greek painting, The Procession of Thetis by Bartolomeo di Giovanni. It is this stepping into a liminal space that seems to be the golden thread throughout Papademetropoulos’ work. A fascination with what appears unknowable; but knowing that entering into this space can lead to great transformation.