Eleanna Martinou

Byzantium Zero

2016

Eleanna Martinou was born in Athens in 1981. She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (2006) and graduated with an MA in arts (2009). Martinou is a studied musician (Athens Conservatoire 1987–2003). She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions, art fairs and festivals in Greece and abroad. Her statement reads, “My intention when I work is to realize the world existing in my imagination. The sense of time is lost and memories and images of fantasy and dreams intertwine in a network. Until recently, through an effort to defend myself by forcefully enforcing my presence in the world, works have emerged where the process itself was a lasting escape from the existing reality. One of these fantasies is the series of Imaginary Metropolises where anger was the vehicle through which I attempted to become lost in a journey through space and time. The body itself, condensing in the gesture anger and the fantasy for a journey in time, gets to be portrayed as a conflict of white and black, in constant rotation and competitiveness. The surface was always an impenetrable wall where the sound of percussion often accompanied the composition. The result was a series of large-scale works consisting of superimposed surfaces, a set of grids, among which often elements that refer to prisons, stairs and maps of metropolises are distinguished; all these referring to dystopia. After a great change in my personal life, a new set of works began: The face itself is the network and the maze, where every person, when closing their eyes is the cluster of thought and wandering. The process does not need violence anymore, but with water and watercolor materials, it follows the natural flow of things.”