KOMILI, artist with a predestined career
Welcome to this new episode of “Portrait of artist” from Galerie Charron, which deciphers the work of young and established contemporary artists. Today, we share with you, in a few words, the story of “KOMILI, an artist with a predestined career” who is exhibiting her paintings at Galerie Charron from 20.01 to 28.02.2022.
KOMILI is of Greek origin, she was born in 1983 in Thessaloniki, a Greek port city on the Aegean Sea. From her earliest childhood, her parents detected in KOMILI what is commonly known as an artistic soul.
However, nothing destined KOMILI to become a painter, since at the beginning, it was rather photography that made her vibrate.
Very contemplative by nature, KOMILI used to go around her big city of Thessaloniki with an old film camera. By taking her pictures, she was freeing her artistic soul by sharing her feelings about her city.
However, photography could not fully satisfy her need for expression. She began to admire painting, pictorial work, more and more by visiting the studios of the students of the Beaux-Arts in her city.
With painting, she imagined she could transgress the simple transcription of a place to go further, without really knowing what this “further” would be.
Then this revelation took shape with her admission to the school of fine arts, and following this education, by the even more concrete decision to paint daily and to make it her profession.
But what is behind Komili’s paintings?
First of all, what attracts our discerning eye 👀 is her passion for depicting the everyday landscape, that of the close environment or the so-called exotic place. The artist appropriates these high colored landscapes with such ease.
She likes to say: “You don’t need to go any further to find pictorial stimuli. The places have a soul, the light is enough to reveal the beauty of the surfaces, of the materials, to highlight the mystery of each represented space”. I invite you to discover the paintings of Komili by clicking here
It is a fact, and yet KOMILI’s artistic inspirations come from much further away. A cultural capital imbued with readings, illustrations and cinema, which will constitute her attic of references.
Among these preferences, it is the British author James Graham Ballard (1930-2009) with his novel-laboratory “The Atrocity Exhibition”, which she discovered at the age of 18, that crystallized her appetite for the representation of the current landscape.
KOMILI: “Ballard has always been with me.
KOMILI speaks of him thus: “J. G. Ballard’s work, very much inspired by the writing of the Beatniks and the surrealist movement, is marked by a great freedom. His writing is contemplative but not lacking in nervousness, and the landscapes he explores are contemporary, psychological landscapes of sorts, which would be projections of the mentality of his characters. Writers such as Ballard, Jerome David Salinger or Philippe Soupault, answer my need to wander in free spaces, resulting from human intervention.
Finally, for KOMILI, the greatest mystery in her eyes being the human being, she transcribes the places he walks, the places he inhabits, the landscapes he shapes into something universal.
There is no chance: “To paint means to think with one’s brush” said Paul Cézanne!
To sum up, if we had to choose one message to convey through KOMILI’s paintings, it would be that, in the same way that KOMILI expresses a tender benevolence towards her subjects, she encourages her viewers to do the same towards the world around them.
We hope you have enjoyed this artistic discovery.
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We look forward to sharing more artist portraits with you…