Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible – painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings.
–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 1961
In his Eye and Mind (1961) the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty put forward the following statement: ‘Science manipulates things and gives up living in them.’ He argued that scientific thinking, ‘a thinking which looks on from above’, and thinks of the world as existing entirely independent of ourselves, has become the dominant rationale of Western thought. Today more than ever we find a prevailing tendency in philosophy to privilege the abstract, objectivist view of reality employed by science, the philosopher insisted. In other words, thinking ‘operationally’ has given rise to a form of ‘absolute artificialism’: the assumption that anything which exists must have been made by a conscious entity and therefore is to be treated as though it were an object-in-general predestined for our rational operations.
Contra this widespread propensity toward the ‘operationalism’ of scientific thinking, Merleau-Ponty contends that true philosophy consists of re-learning to look at the world; that is to say, returning to the site and soil of the perceived world such as it is experienced in our lives and for our bodies. The world is not something external and autonomous that we merely contemplate, but above all something that we inhabit. Whereas operational and reflective thought is removed from our sensible and human engagement with the world, art, especially painting, returns us to a more fundamental and more primary, lived-bodily participation in the world. As he writes in Eye and Mind:
The painter “takes his body with him”, says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.
Aliki Krikidi’s artistic oeuvre no doubt dwells at the heart of this kinaesthetic universe. The undulant figures and musing lines of her multidimensional paintings loosen the viewer from the intentional cords that bind us to the world of rationality and knowledge. Her works are bold and bewildering, laden with a clairvoyance, vitality and ambiguity which appeals to the enigma of visibility. In her paintings, media images are displaced and decontextualized, faces of politicians are defamiliarised and bodies of sportsmen are distorted. As if compelled into the uncertainty of meaning characteristic of Krikidi’s artworks, the objects and individuals that populate her universe are released from the secure narratives by which they are defined.
When observing one of Krikidi’s depictions of crowds, for example, space appears flattened, condensed to a static moment, and yet, at the same time, filled with intense emotion and action that carry the visible into a carnal space way beyond the canvas and confines of ordinary perception. Each individual’s position in the crowd, by virtue of its spacio-temporal dissonance with the adjacent people, seems to render palpable the internal disequilibrium of the artist’s own vision. In so doing, Krikidi’s work compellingly calls attention to pre-reflexive aspects of our experience of the world.
The painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely “physical-optical” relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible…It is a spectacle of something only by being a “spectacle of nothing”, by breaking the “skin of things” to show how the things become things, how the world becomes world.
For Merleau-Ponty, then, painting is an amplification of perception: in short, it marks the way in which we creatively organise and make sense of brute existence. In several of Krikidi’s paintings, bodies are fragmented – legs, hands, trunks and heads are allowed to intersperse and coincide. Her work is arguably energised by an acute sensitivity toward the restricting aspects of logical thinking. She works rapidly, deploying speed as a means of breaking free from the governing laws of operationalism; instead, she seeks a loss of control and to let the spontaneous gestures of the hand bring the painting into life: to notice those soft shadows that play upon the body of lovers embraced, or the alcoves of blackness in a dimly lit up room which recedes into the background in everyday perception.
Krikidi combines abstraction with more representational and photorealistic imagery. In several of her works, contours dissolve into anonymity. Her colour palette is vivid – imbued with vibrant reds, yellows and blues, and saturated with deep hues of green, black and blue – which immediately pull the viewer into dreamlike lands where space is no longer surveyed or conceptualised, but conveyed in its inexplicable thickness: that elusive emptiness that is only when we stand within it. Face to face with one of the paintings by Krikidi, we find ourselves immersed in the sky’s voluminous air or the abyssal depth of a human expression. Often we are struck by sensuous and textured surfaces, vigorous brushstrokes and explosions of colour, all of which together transform into the painting animating the invisible layers of our embodied relationship to the world. An intriguing aspect of the artistic practice of Krikidi is her persistent effort to bring herself as well as the viewer back to this attending darkness and uncertainty of cognition: the phantasmagorical and unconscious premises upon which the phenomenal field of human consciousness is based.
The painter lives in fascination, says Merleau-Ponty. To end I should like therefore to invoke briefly some of the thoughts advanced by another extraordinary writer and thinker, Maurice Blanchot. Whoever is fascinated, he explains in The Space of Literature (1982), inevitably abandons the world of reality, where the possibility of seeing presupposes distance and separation, and instead enters into the realm of fascination. Under the spell of fascination, we are robbed of our power to give sense, and the appearance touches us in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws us close, even though it leaves us absolutely at a distance.
As viewers of Krikidi’s works of art, we enter into a visceral time-space in which, to borrow the words of Blanchot, ‘what one sees, imposes itself upon the gaze, as if seeing were a kind of touch’. Indeed, clinging to the opaqueness of the world, and to the interiority of self, Krikidi’s paintings open upon a fabric of Being that makes visible beautifully the secret and precarious labour of painting and vision itself.
Eugenia Lapteva