Christina Foitou presents her new painting exhibition entitled From body to body at Gallery On Arts – Karteris. Everyday and mysterious images centered on the Woman and her course, with sensitivity and strength.
How did you get to painting?
As a child, it was a secret place of escape, but at the same time, a way of identifying myself. I don't think my motivation then differed from the rest of the world's children. Growing up, my attraction to this field was an integral part of my inner life, something impossible to resist, though I struggled a lot until I found the way.
From Pedagogy to Painting, with studies in Italy...
The route began with studies that my family environment imposed on me. With two older sisters already in Education, I had to be educated and arranged professionally. The “fugitive” proposal in Italy to study came at a time when I had to think very seriously about my life.
I started in Pedagogical Sciences to specialize in Child Psychology. However, frequent visits to Venice, meeting groups from the School of Architecture and the School of Fine Arts, and attending classes there made me realize there was no other choice. As for combining Painting and Pedagogy, it is achieved through teaching Art to children — seven years in schools and six in art workshops keep this relationship alive and interactive.
"An inner unrestrained need to touch the woman, to touch as many of her situations, and my own accumulated pain led me to paint woman confessingly."
What was the trigger for "From body to body"?
I had situations trapped in me for a long time that I call 'women', and I felt that women on many levels have not yet received what they really deserve. It was not a feminist manifesto that motivated me, but an inner unrestrained need to touch woman confessingly.
What do you want these works to express?
I wish to express the voices of women across the globe. To praise their existence, their psyche, their secret and obvious dreams, fears, anxieties, and oppression. Above all, I would like the viewer to be moved and then think and interpret in their own way.
Seeing the exhibition, one feels that you create projects and deconstruct them afterwards...
I started working as an artist in 2011, focusing on research with dancers' bodies, using blind, automatic writing without looking at the painting surface. In 2013-2015, I drew dancers quickly from videotaped performances, then deconstructed them with charcoal following their lines of movement.
These lines traveling into space, a last dance on canvas, and drips of red color — a process I call deconstruction — are necessary for the completion of the works. An outburst is inescapable and redemptive because a quiet, clean, immaculate work cannot rest me.
How could art help people in the adversity they face?
Art, in all its forms, is balm, shelter, deep breaths, mental revival, and fueling, rebirth. Weak is the person who abstains from it in their life, unshielded... Personally, it does not just help me; I live and go along with it. It is an integral part of me — an unthinkable life without it.
