About
Her Art – Reviews
STIAKAKIS VALANTIS
Art Historian
———–
SOFIA DATSERI – AN ORIGINAL DESCEDANT OF 30’S
Sofia Datseri was born in Ierapetra in 1971. She is a painter who highly absorbs folk tradition’s teachings and combines them in a neoteristic texture which becomes easily recognizable. As a result, she leaves her imprint in the modern Greek pictorial sector. Having finished her history studies in the Ionian University, the creator attends painting lessons from Ierapetra’s artists ,while between 1995 and 1999 she attends woodcarving and stone carving lessons, as well as Cretan loom. Since 2000 she focuses her interests on the painting with personal exhibitions in and out of the Greek borders. At the same time she participates in group exhibitions with a significant presence. Additionally, many her artworks belong to private collections.
Preventing an “accent local” she powerfully withstands to the postmodern culture, as well as to the aesthetic quality of our time, she avoids the trend techniques and the ways that are moved away from her Greek central researches. Thereby, insisting on oil pastel’s use – on the paper – she plays with the colours. Moreover, as an original folk creator, who is owned by the “horror vacui”, she fills her surfaces with plastic motives in composites. The latters are moving between two dimensions, even if she moves over the superficial quaintness of populism. Through her colourist artworks anyone realizes that “…the tradition didn’t die..” as Konstantinos Maleas said, still from 1926, highlighting to the contemporary recipients of his speech the folk art’s importance.
…Even if our artistic folklore was a little studied by the contemporaries, it records through the clothing, the emproidery, the chromatic aesthetic quality, the hut’s architecture that a highly aesthetic populace a gentle tradition’s inheritor still resides that country…
Observing her work, anyone easily spots three topical linchpins of orientation. On the one hand, the folk art’s effect which she admires for it’s naturalistic character, is distinguishable. In addition, she underlines that “…I am trying for all of my pieces of art to be carefully disheveled n a technical way. However, I completely avoid the folklore element..”.
On the other hand, in the name of the tradition it should not be ignored the influence of the Minoan art and the patterns, which as the has mentioned: “ I carry them inside of me and they spout as a primal memory ,which directs me. Yet, while I process them I am trying to motivate the Greeks to see them again with love…”.
Finally, in relation to the hellenity that characterizes her personal writing, there is the presence of Greek literature’s confabulated elements. She characteristically mentions that “…the literature gives me a shaped confabulation which I paintingly depict . Notwithstanding ,many times I like to continue the story from the point the author stopped it…”.
Reminding Henri Rousseau‘s and Theophilos Chatzimihail‘s case – whose work was appreciated during the period between the two global wars (1919 -1939), due to the redefinition of the request of the return to the homeland – Sofia Datseri shows via her creations a different perspective towards the “mass” aesthetic in this day and age. Thereby, due to the primitively modern vocabulary and the thematology she incorporates ,the painter brings to the surface the nationality’s ideology. This update was supervened through a way in which the ‘generation of 30’s” would “feel” proud, finding an original descendant.
Subscribe Now
Get notified with the next updates