Intimate Landscape
In the exhibition Intimate Landscape, a series of works crafted by layers of semi-transparent paper placed on top of each other, create the final image of an immaterial landscape. Here, Ioanna Ximeri replaces the medium of drawing with a peculiar process of deducting material from her paper (cut-out). The image is shaped through the disappearance of its material substance while through color detraction, the white that remains references a reality that has been eliminated and becomes one with the infinite. Through the whiteness, every trace of materiality is lost and exteriorly forcible values are negated. The work’s subtlety and delicacy evoke Japanese handicraft while the obscure landscapes that are illustrated leave the same sense of having viewed impressionistic vistas.
Ioanna Ximeri adds a new, personal reading on the classical topic of the natural landscape as a point of escape and a means of catharsis. In a search for spirituality, the works commence an existential self-examination aiming towards the return to the meaningful, as it is portrayed at the Arcadian landscape. The use of transparency in the works reflects clarity as a challenge as well as pursuit in the introspection process. The landscapes remain void of human presence, allowing silence to impose.
Ioanna Ximeri (Heraklion, 1979) is a graduate of De Montfort University, Leicester and Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London. She has obtained scholarships from National Institution of Scholarships and Vardinoyannis foundation. She has taught engraving at the department of Plastic Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina. She lives and works at Heraklion, Crete.