Exploring Creativity, Inspiration, and Beyond

Editorial

Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 50 x 40 cm

“Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

The Metaphysics of nature and the embodiment of the void in the work of Egkrateia Roumpou.

by: Iris Kritikou Archaeologist – Art Historian

Nature considered under all its aspects—as the concrete things of creation; in relation to the divine and human in the Incarnation; as a participant in the interplay between grace and freedom: It should not be surprising, then, that it is central to Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poetic microcosm of faith.

In the end, it is in Paradiso, the least read of the three canticles, which strikes many people as less concrete than the others, that we see the fullness of the grace-nature relation in all its spiritual and ontological depth.

The Divine Comedy, perhaps the most exciting religious poem ever written, was also the result of a deeply human view on the world transmitted through an imaginary rendering of one individual’s experience.

An almost boundless allegory of education based on man’s painstaking journey in search of salvation, linking the personal history of the individual with worldwide history of humankind and presenting this journey as a case in point for all people, as an exodus and a progress through the desert to the promised land.

It is essentially an archetypal story that concerns both individual and community transformation, as Mary Taylor notes in her article “The Sparkling of the Holy Ghost”: The Metaphysics of Nature and Grace in Dante’s Paradiso

As individual existence encounters the history of mankind, the ongoing and interlinked experience of life oscillating between the individual and the community condition, consistently standing up to a fear of the hereafter and people’s longing to manage to encounter and experience happiness on earth, their overall inability but also the – for very different reasons – momentary capacity to transcend everyday weakness, the longing and fragility in human nature that run through the Divine Comedy, rendering it timeless and penetratingly current to this day, also run through this present group of work by Egkrateia Roumpou, providing the viewer with the same compelling visionary propulsion.

Her abstract canvases pulsate with color and light, words, lines, paper embellishments, scars and cracks; they soar in a manner concise yet set out in high relief the intangible essence of human existence, the continuously alternating truth of life’s adventure, which here has been dug up, with visible marks and stigmata.

The capacity or not for human transformation through a confessional catharsis into something new and less corruptible. A personal experience of the world through a palimpsest of circular knowledge but also traces of personal traumatic experience.

The process of sublimation and transformation through the courageous act of painting, which sets aside any cosmetic safety valve, narrates a personal experience of the world in a manner both spare and incarnate.

This condition of confusion and of a penetrating sense of loss, which in Roumpou’s instinctual painting is interrupted occasionally by fragments of self-awareness made flesh; the constantly changing propelling motion of the paintbrush, which, running through various historical and mental episodes, charges with courage through the labyrinth of the mind and the far reaches of the gaze, through their own honest energized and confessional process, forming simultaneously the manner and the locus for rescue.

A new locus of refuge from the Abyss, a tangible form that renders individual niches of truth into universal catharsis.

The vision of the world in Roumpou’s painting, continuously pulsating with gesture and matter, with cries and whispers, with triumphs and disasters, with visualisations and internal vibrations, constitutes a painstaking pledge of creation and primordial action, both individual and collective.

A burden of expectation and consolation in the loneliness of the world, “a small pine tree in the red earth” of nowhere. A rudimentary manner of divesting oneself of the excess and underlining what is precious; a handmade empirical, syllabic tangible alphabet, in uncertain times. A vocal improvisation with nonsense syllables that are passwords for the existence of ways of reading, notes and words that are interwoven inherently – body to body – into the painter’s canvas. And, most importantly, a timeless sensorial and spiritual vehicle for freedom in the unexplored interstices between the visible and the invisible.

A brave return to Beckett’s lambently painful Failure, the swirling eddies, the turn inward and the final Exodus in Crave. In the Purgatory of the mind and the universal mould of genesis and the world that continues to dash us down into darkness and lift us up into the light.