Face Value: The new work of Aliki Krikidi


At first glance, Aliki Krikidi seems to have chosen to paint pictures of today’s worst publicity junkies: politicians and sportsmen, whose names may get into history books or catalogues of useless facts, but whose real contribution to human civilization is negligible. The individuals may sometimes be identified by name (the three ‘B’s are all too recognizable: Blunkett, Brown and Blair), but oddly enough it is not important to the painting who these people are. For these pictures are not portraits; rather, they are depictions of emotional states. Certain newspaper photos affect the artist, arousing particular emotions and responses. It is these feelings which lead her to make a painting. A photograph might depict a journalist murdered by the Russian mafia. But such facts are not relevant to our response to the painting which results. They are, however, probably important to Aliki, who in the first place responds to the newspaper image. To this extent, but not in any other obvious way, these paintings are autobiographical.

Her paintings depict public faces chosen for their ability to communicate visually, their power to promote sympathy - to make a visual statement about a split-second emotional experience. Here are anguish and success frozen by the camera, captured on the wing, immortalized but not explained or examined. It is not Aliki’s intention to investigate the well-springs of emotion, to make a successful narrative from a momentary feeling. It is rather her determination to record the face of life, the look of things, which powers her imagery.

Aliki drew for 18 months to discover her subject matter, on big rolls of paper, expounding a sequence (if not a narrative) by the very action of unrolling the paper to draw upon it, or to show the finished results. Yet these vast rolls packed with pictures are not stories or cartoons, they are the sequential juxtaposition of discrete images, linked together by chance, by the nature of the support upon which they are drawn. (If the paintings deal with frozen moments of time, the drawings, by their sequential nature, inevitably have something of temporal duration about them.) Aliki draws from imagination and memory, and from the casual but unceasing gallery of types to be found in our daily newspapers. She does not draw from the parade of the street observed through the window, and the shapes and lines of her powerful ink characterizations are neighbours only in formal terms. They do have things in common - the kind of ink, a similarity in strokes of the brush, and perhaps a general subject. One roll focuses on the mouth, beginning with a yawn, then changing direction and emphasis to concentrate on gestures of the hand. But no narrative is thus conveyed, only an interest in a particular feature of the human body, and its ability to be expressive. There is great variety in her shape-making, a whole gamut of emotions presented. But these emotions are simply presented, not explored or questioned. They are taken, quite literally, at face value.

Aliki has always drawn. Her training at the National University of Athens was geared to drawing from life - from a whole succession of models arranged in poses of varying lengths. This traditional training was invaluable, and has equipped her for the tough demands of compressed characterization she today imposes on herself. Her subject matter derives largely from newspaper photographs that have for some reason caught her eye: either for an extremity of emotion or gesture or a combination of physical features she finds in some way memorable. From the limited two-dimensional information offered by a black-and-white press photograph she has to reconstruct a reality which is convincing on her canvas. She usually works on a large format (as she says: ‘the way I feel things is to do with the human scale’), so the initial source photo must often be magnified many times, reinterpreted through her imagination and knowledge of the three-dimensional reality of the human face and body. ‘I don’t know anything about sport and I’m not political at all,’ she says. ‘I don’t have a position.’ Except, I would add, an artistic position, which is to suggest a way of looking at the world. We go to our artists for guidance on matters not just aesthetic but also philosophical, and it is good to be reminded of the relative unimportance of politicians and sportsmen in a society so dominated by their largely selfish activities. Aliki puts them in their place: she puts them in perspective - as types, merely. As a collection of expressions, or a meeting point of physical features. As human beings among others. She reminds us that they are not so exceptional as they think.

In a sense, she is dealing with abstractions, with the basic needs and urges that drive humanity. And because of this lack of specificity, titling is a difficult process, mostly reflecting the abstract ideas, states or values (‘More’ or ‘Not’) that the pictures suggest. One title that Aliki has used more than once ‘He Pushed Me, I Pushed Him’ is a mantra from the school playground (a communique from the artist’s son), which serves equally well for all sorts of other walks and conditions of life, not least politics. In fact, how much difference is there between rugby players jockeying for position, and politicians perfecting the Westminster Climb? Or indeed individuals struggling for preferment in any other career or profession?

Aliki starts straight in with the paint on the canvas, with no recourse to drawing first in pencil or charcoal. (She has already made her preliminary drawings in the 18 months she recently devoted to drawing.) In some of these pictures she has used acrylic, which is a swift medium but which she cannot afterwards alter. She prefers oil paint which allows of second thoughts and refinements. Her style is a beguiling combination of the painterly and the linear. In some places she paints and models, in others, she merely outlines. Look at ‘The Hug’. Do not try to identify who is hugging whom - it’s not important. Far more relevant is the way black and white is distributed across the canvas, in a pattern typical of a crowd, of dispersal and crush. Perhaps this diptych is more of a drawing than a painting, but it is a complex and satisfying picture however you define it.

Sometimes Aliki’s paintings fall into two apparently contradictory halves, each painted slightly differently, but skilfully reconciled in the final analysis. Consider the man looking into the future through the frame of his hands shading his eyes. Aliki is discernibly equivocal about him, and it is evident in the painting: the rough treatment of his hands deliberately contrasted with the smooth modelling of his face. His mesmeric expression borders on the evil and intimidating, and the colour is consequently low-key and sub-aqueous.

A footballer who’s just missed a goal has quite literally gone to pieces - he is painted in patches of colour: white, green, brown, flesh, somehow brought back into a whole despite his despair (note his bent head and slumped body). A runner (entitled ‘Me’) is all sheer animal panic, intelligence shrouded by physical exertion, extreme movement to win a race conveyed through the crunched and labouring limbs, the over-lifesize head expressing concentration and desperation.

The gestural freedom of Aliki’s paint application is highly effective, varied here and there with thin staining or eloquent line. The brushy attack is modulated through liquid subtleties, which frequently have an almost Japanese calligraphic quality. Likewise the speed of execution - some passages take hours, others demand days. As she says: ‘I don’t own any technique - it’s not something I have in my pocket. It’s an exploration.’ She has an eye for a telling image, whether we are looking from below up the labouring nostrils of some helmeted footballer or straight at another player ripping his shirt off in momentary despair. Very often the starkness of expression she finds in the extremity caught in a photograph has a kind of blankness upon which she can impose her own response. (Perhaps this is why people do empathize with the sufferings of others, because they can project their own experiences - not their imaginings - onto the trials and tribulations of others.)

The sensation of being alone in a crowd is a familiar one in her paintings. In one picture, there seems to be a fight going on in the left hand corner. But this is not clear - the individuals might be fighting or making love. Aliki likes this ambiguity, in the same way that she likes a certain precision in her characterization. In, for instance, the depiction of what she thinks of as ‘a typical English middle class woman’ in the same painting. And, like a typical English middle class woman, this character observes a certain reticence, she refuses to wear her heart on her sleeve or reveal at once what she is thinking or feeling. Aliki relishes this sense of the hidden lives of others - of the unspoken potential in a situation. There are narratives holding people together in certain situations, but the narratives remain unstated, undisclosed.

Aliki takes a sensation from real life and makes an identification with it from her own life. These may be sensations of similar weight and quality (though of very different fact), but it is her degree of empathy with the reality of the emotion, whatever its context, which gives her work its conviction and authority. That and her ability to orchestrate her forms and lines and colours into an emphatic and dynamic image. The essential mystery of her faces and figures remains (for all the clues of costume), and her subject reverts to the primal imperative - ‘He Pushed Me, I Pushed Him’. And who ultimately can explain that?

Andrew Lambirth
London & Bath: December 2005