Unexpected Gardens
Christos Kechagioglou, Nikolas Bliatkas, Maria Tzirozidou

UNEXPECTED GARDENS
Christos Kechagioglou, Maria Tzirozidou, Nikolas Bliatkas
Unexpected gardens, lush and colorful. Vivid and powerful impressions. A whole world, calm, secret and charming, emerges in the paintings of Maria Tzirozidou, Christos Kechagioglou and Nikolas Bliatkas. Gardens that grow in the extension of reality and imagination. Gardens that invite the viewer to wander through them, to get to know their beauty and to delve into the decipherment of their well-kept secrets. Maria Tzirozidou's works come from the last section of her work, the "Cycladic Gardens", where she tries to "convey the atmosphere of the gardens of her immediate surroundings", with the spring wildflowers, the purple of the lavender, the yellows, the brown and yellow of summer and green of winter to be her inspiration. The fluidity and clarity of watercolor contributes significantly to the sensitivity and romanticism that its images exude. The free writing and the essential descriptive power of the design, the color intensity and the play of brightness, the rhythmic organization and the plasticity of the shapes characterize the compositions of Christos Kechagioglou, who comes to reveal what is behind the visible, that springs from mental and emotional states, experienced intuitively beyond the apparentness of things: "The garden within the garden that is hidden within us." The tonal gradations, rich in qualities and brilliance, the discipline of light and space through the purely  chromatic relations but also the expressive immediacy dominate in the works of Nikolas Bliatkas on the subject of gardens. His visual intention to approach the natural world through the apparent state of its material existence is combined with a pronounced poetic mood, while the allegorical reminders of a lost Paradise, a utopian and mythical garden of Eden, are evident.

Yiannis Bolis
Art Historian