Newspaper photographs give us discrete glimpses of extreme emotion. They are bits of throwaway voyeurism into other people's lives. Sometimes these everyday faces and figures - of sportsmen and politicians - are so familiar that we forget how strange they are to us, what other worlds they inhabit. Aliki Krikidi's compelling paintings do not forget that strangeness for one moment, they dwell in it, wonder about it.

For the past year or more Krikidi has surrounded herself with some of the images from British newspapers that seem to speak most directly to her. She has painted them obsessively and shorn of their context her subjects have taken on lives of their own: a sportsman waiting for a ball becomes an icon of almost religious awe; an image of a politician in an unguarded moment speaks of all human doubt.

All of them are in some senses self-portraits, or at least they explore states of mind that Krikidi can half-recall, or only wish for. By focussing on images removed from their narrative context, taken out of their normal time and space, she brilliantly dramatises her existential view of the world, where familiarity and cohesion are only stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of things.

These are, therefore, most insistently an exile's paintings. Their estrangement is heightened by Krikidi's sense of remaining an outsider in her long adopted home. Her palette borrows the flat light of London, the greys of winter parks and lakes. English light is sceptical of colour, it bleaches it out, finds it unwelcome. This sense flows through all of her recent work. Its great poise and emotion is hard-won. Each painting is an internal journey for artist and viewer alike, a tentative, sometimes frustrating search for home.


Tim Adams
The Observer, London