Opening of exhibition 'Dream Windows' by Ismini Bonatsou

Ismini Bonatsou is in a continuing dialogue with the past, she knits a magical and fantastic world that includes folk, symbolic and surrealistic elements assimilated from various styles and techniques.
In the past four years she continues to fictionalise her dreams and experiences through her work, to decode her subconsious and to playfully combine unexpected elements and naif expressions. The end result conveys a delighful freshness, a certain childishness and a sense of humor. In her world of fables the protagonists are children and women, alone or in pairs, coexisting harmoniously in a microcosm of fruit, fish, and animals. Her figures are charged with symbols, which are not immediately decipherable. Less than perfect, these are creatures gifted with minor humanising defects that exorcise any sense of false idealisation.
In most cases the figures are depicted head on, schematised and monumental, innerly charged, their eyes reminiscent of the Fayum portaits. They are trapped in time and unreal spaces, without perspective, and remain strangers to their surroundings. Her cool flat colours of phychological stress and symbolic meaning seldom betray light. Though her colour range has broadened in relation to her earlier work ?with the expection of her Spanish period? it is still secondary to her flawless drawing technique which remains the main morphoplastic medium. Strong outlines define her subject, while simplistic, childlike elements inhabit a mysterious space.
Ismini Bonatsou can narrate her stories with equal ease on both lilliputian and large scale canvases, proving her ability to convert a simple painterly surface into a memory map. In the footsteps of Marc Chagall, consciously or unconsciously, she isolates her most essential personal experiences and her most emblematic of dreams and connects them to sequential images of childhood naivete. The idiosyncratic innocence of her style fortunately undermines any rational approach.

http://isminibonatsou.blogspot.com/

Listen to sample :