15 Dec HARIS KAMBOURIDES – Art historian-art critic, February 1999
Alice paints as though she is talking or writing and her whole house was transformed into a multicoloured garden a long time ago, with her paintings all around like trees..
When I first saw her works, my first thought was a cliche which I had wanted to be able to say arbitrarily for years, but hardly ever came across anything to warrant it. “Here is a born painter”.
Alice use her colour materials like a placenta that gives birth to new forms. She throws them on the canvas, scatters them with intensity, transposes them into figures or still like and makes them talk among themselves, as relations and contrasts. This results in a painting based on colour, on power, on instinct, on a deep soulfulness. In cliched art critic jargon I would say that Alice’s work is a chromatic expressionism. This, however, would limit her. Our painter does not paint with techniques and style in her mind, she does what she does inevitably and spontaneously, in all innocence and with a certain aggression, as if out of some ecstasy of the soul. She is not an intellectual painter, she is spontaneous.
And perhaps that is why I instantly had the impression that her painting is the result of an explosion of her soul, a harmony achieved by the sole means of the immediacy of a visual confession..
Phasianos who saw a painting of hers in my house studied it carefully. “Where did you get this?” he asked me? “It’s by a new fellow. ” I said from a distance, thinking he was looking at something else nearby. “No, it’s a woman and she paints with a lot of soul”, he answered.. A few days later, in a public discussion we had, the famous painter was telling us how much he adored Theophilos and innocence, reminding me how much the ancient Greeks considered the self taught to be inspired by the Gods. “As I mature, I seek sincere innocence of soul”, he concluded.
As do I before Alice’s paintings.
