The hypothesis in these paintings is that each tiny thought is guided by a moment which functions in an associative manner. The image gives an appearance of simplicity, but it is also composed of a large number of design details, which enable it to gather strength on the level of the message and to communicate. We could say that in this way it reports on its own constituent parts.

Painted images of all kinds are capable of conveying ideas and feelings, and in that sense the painting of Lila Papoula is pure, moulded by personal ingredients in terms of its style and materials. It resembles an interplay of collective visual memories - one which, however, in each work is expressed as an integrated facet, or perhaps a scene from a landscape.

The landscape is not a realistic one, since its purpose is not to be a photographic record, and that aspect of it is of no interest to us. It does not convey the playfulness of latent 'childlikeness' or sterilised nostalgia, despite the fact that the abstractiveness of its painterliness would facilitate such a reading. These are landscapes which, with great thoughtfulness, give us the location of an encounter among memories full of natural combinations.

By natural combinations, we mean those relationships which make use of figurative elements from the environment in order to trigger a new statement of a fleeting thought. Even when the details appear to take the form of obsessions, the landscape which appears in the painting continues to be an image of them. This is the mechanism by which the 'little landscapes' are produced. They are little in terms not of their dimensions, but because their image is incomplete: it has been fragmented by the unconscious side of the artist's impressions and is analysed, in a different way, by the conscious space of the viewer's experience. In this case, communication is not hindered, since the sense of sweetness and tenderness manifest in the subject-matter and the technique inevitably attracts its equivalent in the disposition of the viewer.

Within the framework of the more general trend towards a search for painterly innocence which we can see in art once more today, the work of Papoula - without succumbing to facile puerility - constantly conveys the charming extrapolations of courageous, simple contemplation.

The question is not one of innocence, and the purpose does not appear to be simplicity. We can see that this is an artistic choice on the thematic level and in the mode of the technical process which describes simple detail. When one concentrates, one can retrieve from the natural capacity of each little landscape the world which has been painted there. That is the painterly quality of Lila Papoula, and her achievement so far.

We have learned to expect that painted images should be rigid and that they should reach us, in a state of constant change, through complex mental mechanisms. Nonetheless, we would like painted images to reach us in a simpler way, in a one-to-one relationship with our own cognitive world. Art can be seen to have achieved that quite often. The language of line and colour, with its potential for infinite combinations, has always been able to tell us about everything imaginable.

The work we see here succeeds in precisely that respect. The painting is the design medium in which we can search to find things we know: faces, landscapes, colours and patterns which all remind us of objects or forms, dreams or stories.

Papoula is capable of working in materials of all kinds - natural or personal - which create an internal necessity and thus, in their turn, endow her work with its natural beauty.

Beauty is guided by internal necessity and this means that a work can be simultaneously beautiful and ugly, depending on the way in which one looks at it. When a work has been created in absolute harmony with the inwardness and the need of the artist, then all its shapes, all its colours, and even its smallest details will have a specific function in the work. On such occasions, the meaning is complete, its purpose is visible, and the problem of the social space to which it is addressing itself has been solved. The works in this exhibition are governed by precisely those rules.

Olga Daniilopoulou

Lila Papoula
par Katherine Drossopoulos

Lila Papoula intitule ses œuvres récentes « Petits Paysages ». Tels les fragments de murs peints, ces paysages apparaissent comme un microcosme mental, des parcelles de mémoire enluminées de teintes fluides, aux figures a peine dessinées par un trace aussi doux qu'un murmure. Est-ce la mémoire secrète d'un mur ? Est ce un souvenir qui conte des parcelles du vécu, ou l'on retrouve parfois la lueur fraîche et lointaine de l'enfance ? Le support des œuvres de Lila Papoula est intimement lie a sa peinture, ces deux éléments essentiels de son expression (peinture et support), véhiculent tout le sens du contenu. Depuis des années, l'artiste recherché le rendu de l' espace par des effets de matière.
Aujourd'hui, la muralite du support obtenue par des empâtements d'enduit plâtreux, devient le tissu de son espace mental et affectif. Au fil du regard, les figures se suivent en un entretien transformateur. En fait, il s'agit d'un dialogue mentale est generee par la dynamique des associations d'idées. Souvent un stimuli visuel, la plupart du temps accidentel, déclenche une série d'images et d'idées ; ce peut être une tache sur un mur décrépi, une flaque d'eau, une forme ou une figure dessinées, une craquelure, une trace sur la matière préparée du support. L'œuvre se construit par couches, les elements (figures et couleurs) des différentes étapes restent apparents ça et la, et concourent a la formation de la composition définitive. Lila Papoula travaille directement sur son support, sans dessin préparatoire, ni esquisse préalable. La texture mate et tendre de l'enduit plâtreux capte avec immédiateté cette expression spontanée. Celle-ci est exprimée par des moyens diversifies : tel le trait de crayon qui cerne certaines figures et trace parfois des trajectoires mnemo-spatiales, ou la transparence et la fraîcheur des couleurs déploient des souvenirs-modeles a la surface lumineuse de la conscience. La narrativite de cette contingence perceptive et plastique s'exprime aussi par le détournement des matériaux, tel que les limailles, les fils et les grilles métalliques et l'usage de l'enduit. Ces matériaux sont réinvestis du sens particulier qu'ils inspirent a l'artiste. Par leur schématisation deliberee, les figures revêtent pour l'artiste le sens des idéogrammes, elles ont la valeur d'un idiome sémiologique. Ces figures sont les acteurs de ces paysages oniriques, elles deviennent les habitants de ces perspectives d'environnement citadins et ruraux. Présentées telles les fragments d'une fresque, ces perspectives sont empreintes de sensibilité intérieure. Ce dialogue perceptif entre le champ visuel, la mémoire et le vécu de l'artiste est réalise par la peinture, il s'exprime dans les œuvres par la suggestion du mouvement. Un mouvement évolutif représente par des voitures, un bateau ou un train, l fumée, le vol d'un oiseau, des ballons rouges ou des cerfs-volants. Elles sont telles les personnifications de cette volonté de représentation du monde intérieur de l'artiste.

Katherine Drossopoulos

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