Municipal Art Gallery of Lamia “Alekos Kontopoulos”
Throughout the long history of Western civilization, perceptions of the human body have been dominated by a fundamental division between the body, which exists simultaneously as matter and medium, and the spirit or soul, understood respectively as mind and emotion. From the outset, this dualism has exerted—and continues to exert—a profound influence on philosophical, theological, and scientific thought. The body has been symbolically associated with matter, earth, the feminine, the ephemeral, and the weak, while the spirit has been associated with intellect, heaven, the masculine, the eternal, and the omnipotent. This opposition was grounded in the belief that our perception of reality through the sensory organs and the senses more generally is flawed and incomplete, in contrast to the validity and reliability that the mind and rational thought are believed to provide in the pursuit of knowledge.
This dominant conception led to the devaluation of the senses, reaching its most extreme expression in the moral prohibition of bodily pleasures and in the condemnation of both biological instincts and their emotional repercussions upon the physical body. The lived body thus became a battleground between nature and culture. What is curious, however, is that nature is characterized by its indifference to the principle of contradiction, recognizing each body as an integrated whole, free from the divisions that are ultimately products of culture. In the development of philosophical thought, this opposition has been increasingly challenged. Among other arguments, it has been proposed that, in order for anything to exist, it must first be inscribed upon the body. Ideas, meaning, and emotions emerge as lived experiences, through which thought is formed and the soul comes into being.
Maggidis’s work reveals precisely this process. Emotion is inscribed as lived experience upon the human form and, through art, reveals the balance between the two poles of soul and body. Here, emotional experience appears as a form of knowledge through which the artist apprehends her world, rather than simply as a reaction or emotional response to a particular psychological state at the moment of artistic creation. Her works present themselves as pages from a research diary: a visual notebook of emotions in which charcoal records the figure upon paper as a psychological portrait.
The artist chooses the simplicity of her medium and invites us to search for what remains unspoken within the form. The figures, which appear to exist on a second, interior plane, emerge momentarily into the light for the sole purpose of revealing the emotional state that governs them. The indeterminate, existential background, in which past and present coexist dreamlike, together with the ambiguity surrounding the biological sex of the figures, lends the works a universality that belongs to emotional experience, removed from every form of distinction. Powerful, contracted muscles held in tension, painterly curves, and anxious gestures share fleeting moments of light within blacks that are at times dense and at others soft and diffuse. The bodies are rendered as profoundly affected beings, appearing either in recognizable, expressive poses or within compositions that verge on the anarchic, where the increasingly forceful line traverses and arbitrarily constructs forms whose movement suggests a particular psychological impression.
The body decodes and liberates emotional expression, ceasing to function as both instrument and prison of the spirit. The soul no longer possesses a body. The continual interaction between the inner and outer worlds, conveyed through materiality, releases the explosive force concealed within the soul. Here lies both the power of art and its capacity, through artistic creation, to transform the human being’s inner impulse into matter—with the ultimate purpose of communication and the search for authentic knowledge.
Konstantinos Bourazanis
Art Historian / Exhibition Curator
Athens School of Fine Arts
POLYPTYCHON
(May 18 - June 29, 2022)
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
MAG24.GR Online Magazine:
Interview with Artist, Chrysanthi Maggidis (2022)
Following the opening of her solo exhibition Polyptychon at the Municipal Art Gallery of Lamia “Alekos Kontopoulos,” Chrysanthi Maggidis was interviewed by MAG24.GR Online Magazine about her artistic practice and the ideas underlying the exhibition.
The interview explores Maggidis’s approach to the human figure, her engagement with the relationship between the physical body and the inner self, and the role of emotion, movement, and psychological experience within her work. It also discusses the conceptual and technical development of Polyptychon, an exhibition characterized by expressive figuration, dramatic compositions, and an intense interplay of darkness and light.
Polyptychon opened on 18 May 2022 and was presented at the Municipal Art Gallery of Lamia “Alekos Kontopoulos” until 29 June 2022. The exhibition was organized and introduced by the Gallery’s Director, Efi Papaefthymiou, and curated by art historian Konstantinos Bourazanis.
