Trees that stand alone. Ornate branch formations. Spectral presences. Antigoni Kavvatha returns to a theme that has been appearing in her work in various versions. Each of the works is charged by the emphatic importance she gives to it and the way she works on it – it is the result of systematic study, persistent processing, acute observation, demonstrating her vital relationship with the world, her stance on her contemporary realities. Her inspiration always comes from real life – from images of burnt forests and “dead” trees due to lightning or drought, images that are familiar and frightening, that hurt with the desolation and sense of total destruction that they exude, while at other times, they submit a heavy, melancholy atmosphere. Antigoni Kavvatha, however, manages to transform these images. And here lies the “magical” power of art: to transform and to recast. The trees emerge as paradoxical totems in an alien, petrified environment, at the edge of reality, fantasy and dream (or nightmare), seeming to demarcate the meeting points of two worlds between light and darkness, to define a process of passage and transition to another state, to evoke internal fears, to intensify the feeling of existential anguish in a world immersed in silence, to invoke a deeper communication, to refer to life and death. The color black maximizes the expressive immediacy, power and vigor of her compositions that contain not only the intensity of a dark ecological allegory, but also the atmosphere of an eerie Gothic story or the mystery of a distant, in place and time, landscape of romanticism. Antigoni Kavvatha’s works with trees, in large or small dimensions, stand out through a manner that is sensitive and detailed, rich in visual values, aesthetic qualities and content, a manner that passionately defends the possibilities of the art of painting.

Yannis Bolis
Art historian