Natassa Poulantza

PORTRAITS
Excerpt from Peggy Kounenaki’s catalogue text.

The balance of opposites

…Natasha Poulantza decides to paint flowers commonly recognized as beautiful. She watches their course, records their beauty and vitality, comments on it, and follows the gradual loss of their luster. She converses with the contrast her dipole expresses; beautiful fresh flowers painted in a pop-art manner, while others stand huge and de-colored, submerged in an atmosphere of inwardness and skepticism. In a way, she seems to converse with the past and the present. The contrastive concepts “optimism/pessimism” is called forth in order to show that they are sides of the same coin, with heads or tails played years ago. This is how life and art have moved on. She also accepts the transformation of fresh flowers as a life game. “This transformation does not lead to a cancellation of reality but a difficult inter-association between the truth of what is real and the practice of freedom; “natural” things become “more than natural”; “beautiful things become “more than beautiful”; and every object appears “endowed with a spontaneous life just like the soul of the creator”, Baudelaire says in his book The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. A phrase very elaborately commented on by Michelle Foucault: “The Baudelairean modernity is an exercise during which the extreme care towards what is real is balanced off with the practice of freedom, which respects this very reality and at the same time breaks it”…

October 2006