In their joint show, Irini Karayannopoulou and the French artistic duo Hippolyte Hentgen deluge the gallery space with images: tiny ones, huge, monumental, moving images, others that one can be listened to, a few camouflaged behind other images, sometimes even within them.
Under the title Light snacks and heavy make-up, the exhibition of the three women reveals a piece of their shared artistic universe, the birthchild of an unconscious artistic kinship and a romantic online friendship, which developed among them as an imperative need.
The exhibition presents series of paintings, collages and videos that function as a unified environment and compose an ode to the shared idiosyncratic art of the duo from France and the Greek visual artist.
Their practice remains intrinsically feminine, not in terms of material, pattern and form, but rather because their work is completely surrendered to the female gaze. This surrender can’t but be attributed to the gaze of all three artists, a gaze exhaustively exercised and unassumingly unbridled by male perspective.
The works in the exhibition, with a strong element of humour, poignancy, pop references, incorporate the collage technique in a broad and contemporary sense, not far from the qualities Lucy Lippard recognizes in it in 1980: a dialectic that exposes social and cultural myths, decentralizes the dominant discourse, with a spirit, however, both unifying and inclusive.
Hippolyte Hentgen present a series of works where they reconstruct the narratives of the female body, as this appears in everyday culture and comics, and also as they experience it themselves through movement and painting gesture. At the same time, Irini Karayannopoulou presents a new series of oil paintings, faithful though to her characteristic way of composing image through varied and unexpected visual fragments. Her earlier collages coexist with new and bold painting compositions resuming a dialogue she orchestrates around countless elements, fetish objects, female body and sexuality, and humour.”
Christina Petkopoulou