Three distinct elements merge in the artistry of Xenia Arapaki.
Xenia Arapaki the painter, is in fact “threefold”.
Her students know her mainly as the university professor who opened up their horizons on matters of didactic methods for children’s arts education, particularly painting. She has taught them to trust their senses, their emotion and to not rely solely on a heavy theoretical toolkit that would rob them of the personal experience and emotional connection to the art making process. However, her expansive scope of research goes beyond the study and teaching children’s arts education, and the application of her findings to the illustration of texts, also addressing and studying the relation between the arts and the sphere of technology and natural sciences.
She was set on this course by the artistic endowment and passed on to her from great teachers at Athens School of Fine Arts: Georgios Mavroidis, Panayiotis Tetsis, and Dimitris Mytaras. All of them were artists who explored first through the gaze, and cherished shape, colour and composition. These are the values that Xenia Arapaki inherited and embraced in her own teaching approach. She invites future educators, especially those destined for pre-school and primary education, to immerse themselves, and initiate their students, in a world of visual arts where their abilities and strengths are not limited and stifled by the need for expert knowledge and implementation.
These principles seem to also translate to her other two “facets”: ceramics and painting, both of which she received distinctions for during her studies at the Athens School of Fine Art.
Her “past life” in ceramics is obvious in her paintings: gestural brushstrokes, thick impastos and, many times, heterogeneous materials, bestow to the canvas surface a sense of relief which is heightened even further by shadowing and the interplay of light.
Beyond the influence of her ceramics origins on her artistry, her painting style maintains its own intrinsic identity. Her draughtsmanship, an ability that is no longer a de facto priority for painters, is obvious even when the artwork lacks a distinct, recognisable physical subject. Her palette mostly leverages a limited range of colours, usually earthy tones, the powerful dynamism of which she emphasises masterfully. Her composition style projects a natural simplicity. However, one quickly realises that there have been multiple iterations from the artist, so that our eyes may rest on the image smoothly to joyfully encounter beauty.
Her painting style could be characterised “abstract” in Sartre’s interpretation for the term: “subtracting means adding”. To remove the superfluous, therefore, is the sole path to reach and extract the essence of things. Besides, on the surface of her paintings, we can detect the structure of built and the natural environment that often co-exist with Man.
These traces are some joined with the composition and the brushwork above, as a way to create on the surface of the painting a haziness and intentional intermixing of colours which seems to draw its inspiration from the works of Gerhard Richter (1932-) or Cy Twombly (1928-2011).
The aesthetic of Xenia Arapaki exudes coherence. In a way, it is an extension of her teaching experience and her ceramics practice. With her use of colour, shape and composition, she re-assembles her personal impressions and invites us to share in that experience by recreating our own. Perhaps her art does not surprise us and jars us. Instead, it calms us and imbues us with serenity – and that is not an easy feat.
Dr. Georgia Kakourou Chroni