Reviews

Searching for harmony in a one-dimensional world – The art of Erietta Bordoni

Shortly after my visit to Erietta Bordoni’s studio, I received a clarifying message from her in which she tried to explain her artistic intentions: “I hope you understand that my goal in my work is to bring harmony, as much as possible, given the our contradictory, meteoric reality, maintaining our state of equilibrium. That’s why I marry these different materials. And that for me art is purification and healing, as it has been for millennia.” Indeed, as I had the opportunity to find out for myself, Bordoni’s works emanate peace, balance and harmony, which are also present in the Greek landscape. Not by chance, in our conversation the artist was quick to mention Matisse, who occasionally gave his works to friends to make them feel better. Likewise, Vordoni’s ultimate goal is painting that has a healing and regenerating power painting capable of evoking pleasure, mirth and exultation.

Erietta Bordoni’s works contain clear references to Epicurean philosophy: on the surface—woven from contrasting materials—we find passages from the Tetrapharmacus, the most characteristic of which is: “It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living with prudence and dignity and fairly”. In fact, this handwritten message sounds the alarm, addressed not only to the viewers of Vordoni’s work, but also to every modern person who is searching for the true meaning of life. Let us not forget that, according to Epicurus, the reverse is also true, which is implied by the words: “…just as it is impossible to live wisely and honestly and justly without living pleasantly.”

Vordoni’s painting warns and protects. Her paintings work like a talisman for those who own them and can enjoy them every day. Her painting is humanistic, but with a strong metaphysical aura. It is visionary painting based on empathy and an aversion to self-centeredness. The artist creates multiple spaces that literally—due to the reflection of her materials—as well as metaphorically, mirror ourselves in a state of emotional alertness. Looking at these complex spaces and the spectral figures that inhabit them, you get the feeling that time stretches out like a dream. You can see people embracing, their eyes fixed on the light, absorbed, magnetized, enchanted by the beauty of the landscape. You distinguish flowers, carnations and blue tulips, butterflies and horses, which have symbolic power. In Vordoni’s works, man is depicted in a state of flight and spiritual quest, sometimes presented as a modern Icarus, as a superhero flying in the sky and sometimes as a lone horseman, thus conversing with Picasso’s archetypal figures.

If we wanted to summarize the main characteristic of Erietta Bordoni’s painting, we would say that it is the search for harmony in a one-dimensional world dominated by excess, selfishness and greed. Her work is characterized by contemplative mood, dialogue, (restrained) eroticism, tenderness and lyricism (one thinks of Marc Chagall). For Vordoni, the ideal of beauty is not an abstract—and nowadays misunderstood—idea. On the contrary, it is an essential component of art and contributes to its understanding. And it is precisely this ideal that runs through Bordoni’s painting – a painting created with particular sensitivity, care and devotion.

Christopher Marinos
Art Historian

The totems as landmarks, as “Hermai” that establish the entrance to houses and temples, as boundaries of the path to each journey, are also a symbol of the occupation of a space that would otherwise have no masters. therefore it would not be defended by anyone The concept of occupation – protection of marking boundaries, of leaving traces, is the
antidote to excessive consumption without energy mutation In Bordoni’s work, the combination of the archetypal demarcation symbol with the epitome of a mystical figure, brings back the sense of the sublime of Byzantine art, the idea of the “image”, in conjunction with the ancient tradition of statuary .

Emi Varouxakis

Erietta Bordoni, in her last exhibition in May 2012 in Milan, speaking about her work, said the following: “I think we live in a time where everything is pending. Where we are called to marry and harmonize contradictions and contrasts so that we can live in harmony. To express this era on transparent materials, in an “immaterial space” gliding in metallic sparkles,
touching the softness of a velvet, pressing the porous surface of a burlap, my work is born. A piece of work
often three-dimensional, where opposites fall in love, marry and between textures and matter allow a journey in the dream. I paint with oil, I draw with charcoal, with ink, I leave traces that emerge from collective memories or from those that surprise me, enchant me and I want to protect them from the sweeping passage of time.”

Milan, Italy 2010

The art of Erietta Vordoni

The color – above all – in the painting of Erietta Bordoni reveals, unfolds the secrets of forms, ideas that often compose an underground dramaturgy.
The shape is not sharp, it always manifests itself with some implication: suspicions and whispers of thoughts, momentary impressions which come from the real world, to be transformed into a peculiar metaphysics.
The models, whether they are people, horses, trees, plants or just a seat somewhere between chaos and actual landscape (landscape memory), are enveloped in the diffused light of her colors.
I have been following the transformations of Erietta Bordoni for a long time now, since the Paris years, at the end of the 20th century, and I wonder how she manages to combine post-impressionism, expressionism and poetic allegory!
Her Eras range from the harsh design with the lush color of her works such as the Titans (cycle of great power) and later to the philosophically sparse with few colors of her other cycle (I would call it the “theme of solitude and self-concentration”), to culminate in the gardens of Epicurus, with the giant plants, of strange unreal worlds.
Her recent creations unfold epic images, of a humanity in flood and exile, groups of people, in search of innocent places, where the creator Erietta Bordoni leads us to new thoughts of mystery and riddles.
The visual effect and “harvest” of her works makes me think of some parallels with other figures of European painting, especially the French post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard (in the peculiarity of liquid colors in closed spaces) and Edouard Vuillard, in the rendering of colors of nature (the garden of Epicurus) with its own style, purely personal, unconventional and playful.
Finally, if we would like to accompany her works with music, I think Igor Stravinsky would be ideal: a multifaceted iconographer of the subconscious.

Christopher Christofis

Playwright – director, poet
Karolos Koon Drama Award 2021

Women’s memory is the center of Erietta Bordoni’s research, who finds references to the ancient world from her own imagination. Her totems, objects spread out in space like wandering souls, come to life from the countless images that mark them and are identified with endless episodes of a personal history. They are not individual moments but points of a collective history, words of a complete discourse.
Art is the landing in a dance without limits but clearly defined by the desire not to die.

ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA

…In her latest work, Bordoni raises key questions about the role of Art in recognizing a quality of existence that will transcend any form of earthly concerns. To be in harmony with the universe we must have an accurate sense of proportion, and in this spiritual state the human form functions as a central point of reference from which all our actions radiate….
Erietta Bordoni’s painting manages to represent the exact moment of balance, preserving it in the future where we will need to remember it again.

Dan Cameron
Director of the New Museum, New York excerpt from the catalog of the solo exhibition “There” Athens, May 1996

Her work is a hymn to the fragility of touch and the sensuality of painting. He does not paint descriptions and narratives, but mental states, sensations and impressions. It speaks of the immateriality of life, the beauty of the ephemeral, the precious of the occult. A work that invites us to internal reflections.

Florent Bex
Honorary Director of the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art

I try to imagine Bordoni’s work over time. I ask her how she imagines it working during it. “I would mostly like it to work in a friendly way.. he replies “To see passers-by stop and sit down. to chat with the sitting girl. to look for a break from the summer heat. to live with him. As I was leaving I remembered two verses by Goethe: ” If you want to gallop towards the infinite, then cross it within limits on either side of it…” And I walk away, leaving behind me the “Sky Hunters” of Erietta Bordoni, exploring the limits, galloping joyfully towards the infinite.

Iris Kritikou
November 2006

In Vordoni’s work, the eye and the mind discern the secrets of certain past or present civilizations located “somewhere or elsewhere” in the secretive Mediterranean basin, cradle of the world. Reminiscences of antiquity, of more or less recent memories, of traditions, and aspects of daily life are transmuted into art in a lyrical atmosphere, liberated from space and time. Vordoni’s work nourished by her own poetical and metaphysical reflections eloquently evoke life’s profundities. Life in its infinite expressions with its plurality of forms, in its evanescent moments.

Pierre Chaigneau

Ex-Curator of the Nice Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art,

France

Erietta Vordoni’s paintings speak of brushing contacts and area astride centuries. They risk the whirlpools of shipwreck in order to save what still can be saved, a fugitive emotion, a desire for blue, the imperceptible brush of an angel’s wing. In order to see further, beyond conventional horizons, her painting sometimes climbs steles of flotsam or enters the hollows of improbable columns of air. Nothing is less ludicrous than these beacons shining on the margins of unchained flows, in the middle of network storms, above the magma of information.

Among the icy winds accompanying the beginning of our century on the threshold of dream for-saken nights, the painting of Erietta Vordoni, archieologist of lost complicities, traps sentiments, sumptuous as holy banners, familiar as votaries.

Jean-Louis Pradel Art historian,

Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’ Arts Décoratifs

The works of Erietta Vordonl offer themselves to the viewer’s regard, but at the same time they escape and hide.

Their resistance to be captured by a look is the outcome of a special technique – a technique which, without doubt, tallies with the painter’s wish to obscure the reading, to speak elliptically and safeguard the secret. Duality reigns supreme at all levels. Using on the pictorial surface special kinds of materials, sometimes transparent and other times covered or half-faded, she creates a succession of views. It is as if she wants, by maintaining the Illusion of space and depth, to question it through the medium of reflectional means of expression. Besides, these visual barriers” are once again introduced into her work via chromatic surfaces. Materials, forms and colours penetrate reciprocally into every work with an unceasing motion, layers and coatings are added on level after level, arranged in such a way that the look is lost. The look that recognizes a continuous “commotion” in an image that develops and augments painterly space. The images function as per an inordinate and sensitive richness of colour. Woman and femininity are omnipresent. With a conspiratorial air, the artist reminds us of the great nudes of art history: Odalisques and ancient goddesses. Images of contemporary women who seem to hide and reveal themselves at the same time; provocative in their naivete and sincerity; voluptuous but always innocent. Erietta Vordoni suggests a world where adolescent dreams mingle with a mature woman’s desires; a world of magic where surprise prevails. She paints the relativity of sight and memory. She presents and conceals, focalizes and disperses.

Her work is a hymn to the fragility of touch and the aestheticism of painting. She does not paint descriptions and narratives, but spiritual conditions, feelings and impressions. She speaks about the immateriality of life, the beauty of ephemerality and the value of intimacy. A work that invites us to engage in meditation.

Florent Bex

Honorary Director of the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art.

BODIES AND MEMORIES

Gauguin used to advise his students to draw from memory, because the emotionally coloured natural forms are more perfect and central in the memory. The pictorial representations of Erletta Vordoni, from the early 1980s to date, appear to balance between pursuit of impermanence and passion for perpetuity. Memory conduces her to approximate man’s profoundest image and painting allows her to portray it.

Vordoni was taught the secrets of painting at the Athens School of Fine Art with Yannis Moralis and Yorgos Mavroidis as her tutors. She went on to Paris to further her studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, while also availing herself of the opportunity to make an in-depth study of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Giacometti. These foremost artists gave the impetus to her speculation and quests. It was in the mid-1980s that she began discovering the personal world of her icons. She plucked up courage to create an affecting painterly world, catering exclusively to the viewer’s sensibility. Vordoni has never shunned feeling; on the contrary, she intensifies it to the point of inversion, thereby learning the secrets of human life.

From the outset of her artistic venture to date, the human figure is pivotal for her pictorial achievements. For her, there is nothing beyond man and nature. She acknowledges that beauty in art does not emanate from a faithful representation of reality, but from the creator’s urge to produce a new icon capable of vetting the real. Thus passion and intellectuality guide her along a personal path unto the discovery of her inner world, a psychic reality. Her images are profoundly humane, as though eagerly trying to provide an answer to the enigmatic mystery of life. No specific space or time is apparent in her work. Her figures function to the rhythm of a poetic milieu. The same goes for her latest work, of the period 2000-2002, wherein she focuses her attention on equating painterly expression with the notional substance of each work. She paints like weaving, using disparate materials, as for example crystalline paper, metal, plexiglas and colours, thus gaining a harmony through the medium of such disparate materials. Her forms are represented by a curved line and shaped like an ellipse, with no regard to their structural makeup. Her drawing is sharp, and colour becomes the principal expressive medium through the transparency. Vordoni avoids a clash of colours, aligning the power of her materials and colours with lightness and finesse. Her technique remains free and unattached, without adhering to the traditional precepts of painting. Rhythm and sensitivity coexist and counterbalance. Forms and colours interweave, since she draws and paints at the same time. Light blue, ochre and pink hues, suggestive black and dazzling white colours, among others, exalt the atmosphere of her images. Her colours, with their distinct quality, somehow filter into the human soul, evoking memories of intense experiences. For example, the black she uses, in not one of her works does it assume an oppressive density, seeing that it only takes a dab of brown or purple to palliate its dark power. Her compositions, large and small, are distinguished by their chromatic equipoise, this being austere, plain and full of lyricism. I need also mention that however much she confines coloration to basic conjugations, she always maintains the force of colour that stimulates feeling. However, her world does not simply abandon itself to lyrical reminiscences and visions, but delves into a vital revelation of life. Her forms fortify the conceptual atmosphere of her work, and give rise to a number of questions.

Judging by her pictorial images, it would appear that Vordoni was never an abstract painter who disregards or rejects life. She always works the way she feels. She lives the metamorphosis of an image, through material time, with such immediacy, that perhaps only a child can have such a bold imagination. She paints sometimes feverishly and other times cautiously, but without ever losing track of the overall icon; and she is always adamant to applying herself to essential details. Her forms are distinguished by the directness of their painterly expression, thus boosting the notion of an amorous conversation. The mystic love world comes to the fore as a reminder that all men desire and hope for nothing more than atonement. The bodies, executed with quick brush strokes, are portrayed beyond the corruption of everydayness, In order to reveal the triumph of love in life. Both colour and composition are subject to an idea. Intensity and clarity distinguish the chromatic gamut of the bodies. Her vivid technique gains by the elaboration of tones and their slight, playful alternations, the colours having developed a unique sensibility. The space of her works broadens with the deployment of colours of painterly substance and bright colours, thus creating a nonstop outward motion. This chromatic expressive energy enhances the final picture, whereas the figurative elements blend with abstract ones Vordoni follows instinctively her creative imagination, her world constantly metamorphosed, and her figures never static. Her persistent recourse to the past manifests her deep love of man and her implicit faith in her feelings. Throughout her artistic venture, Vordoni has remained faithful to her principles. Always curious and stubborn, in her work she strives to plumb the depths of human life and discover its secret. Her own truth is neither abstract nor absolute. She approaches man and nature with due respect, and has no trouble in convincing us that she feels the beauty of painting musically and that she is a wholehearted devotee of it.

TAKIS MAVROTAS,

Director, Pieridis Museum of Contemporary Art

BRIGHT AND AITHERIAL

(there is vitality in the “past to come”)

All our writings would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come. Maurice Blanchot (The Step Not Beyond)

One does not look at the work of Erletta Vordoni so much as land inside, falling into a cloud emanating from a world only she knows how to access. It is a world where description turns to lyricism. Listen to these fragments on Vordonl’s work:

Moments of the day: daybreak or nightfall, in which lines are blurred and mists obscure forms and fuse colors. (Liberation, 1989)

La peinture d’ Erietta Vordoni parle de frolements et chevauche les siecles. Jean-Louis Pradel, 1998)

Both of these writers invoke Chronos time to describe the experience of Vordoni’s work. For one experiences the work rather than merely gazes, lost in its visual and textural beauty. ” instinctively mix images and feelings of the past with everyday experiences”. Experience is time accumulated. My time, your time, their time. It is what we take with us out of the chaos which is history. Vordoni’s canvases are chunks of this experience wrapped in the Inviolability of mortal stillness (Christian Larrieu, 1984). We feel calm and tender before them because they reach out, Inviting us in, offering a glimpse of something light and exciting: a vision of the past yet to come.

Nothing exists before time; It is our meaning and material. In ancient Orphic theology Chronos is Indeed the origin of all. But in order to bring intelligibility into the universe, Chronos must contend with his offspring: Chaos and Alther (ether) who tumble and spin until their fusion forms an egg, familiar symbol of fertility and life. And from this egg a figure emerges, Phanes: winged, bisexual and self- fertilizing, bright and altherial, he gives birth to the first generation of gods and is the ultimate creator of the cosmos.

The creator is the artist, the self-fertilizer, who puts everything together, deriving power from Chronos: knowledge from Chaos and Aither. In Vordoni’ s cosmos Chronos is clearly master: Time is Intemporal. Everything lives within us no matter how many centuries have gone by”. But time is impossible to see, it rushes by

as if transparent: layer upon layer of hard and soft material collect, yet pass through our eyes. It is as if we see through our lives rather than feel every contingency. Or as Roland Barthes once said speaking of language but, here we can apply it to Vordon’s images, “language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words Instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my

words”.

In Vordoni’s art, an epic sense of experience rubs against us, is captured and stilled yet, paradoxically, never at rest. The flat surface upon which she works never becomes a specific representation (for instance, an egg-symbol of life), but a matrix of materials where collects and echoes. We see into time.

At first one might mistake Erietta Vordoni’s work for a kind of neo- expressionism, which, by definition, involves the unburdening of an individual subjective consciousness. Expressionism takes what is Inside of a person and lets it flow out, without checks or balances, onto the canvas. Certainly one senses such explosiveness in Vordoni’s work but with a difference. Alone, she may be, while working in her “little factory” of a studio “painted white, high cellings, large windows, lots of light with lots of materials thrown everywhere!”, but the works is not about her alone. It embodies, rather than expresses, a boundless sensation of reverberation. In other words, if one could see an echo, Vordoni’ s art would belt. Who is this echo we hear with our eyes and sense of touch? What is this other that dominates the work, turning it from expressive image into complex experience?

Is it the lone figures, the faintest of drawn gestures, victors over

Chaos?

Or, the metal that serves as “blind mirrors” throughout her oeuvre? Or, the iridescent pearl, itself a creature of milky, transparent

accretion?

Or, the wrinkled, worn reflective paper she uses like new skin

grafted over a wound?

Or, the total effect of time’s transparency fashioned into atmosphere, the soft thickness of the cloud we have landed on? Of course it is all of these things. Echoes of memory that are not Vordoni’ s alone but encompass dear Chronos taming and stilling of Chaos: “I first create a chaotic atmosphere on the support and from this space emerges the artwork like a live organism which is born out of nowhere”. Bright and aitherial, but pours vitality and optimism, a future-present of color, texture, silk, feathers and gold leaf. We have been led through a magic hole in the swirling, ether- like atmosphere (Dan Cameron, 1996), where glimpses of time stilled, yet dynamic, come into being. The painting is never the same but at the same time it is never different. From nowhere a vision of desire is born. Creation has taken place. I hear an echo. “After all, let us not forget that life is a wonderful gift!”.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, 2002. Professor, School of Visual Arts, New York City.

Unless cited, all quotes are Erietta Vordon’s

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