Artist of the Month - Maria Papacharalambous
The artist has led and participated in a huge quantity of activities and performances, both in Cyprus and in other countries. She has participated in multiple exhibitions, and has also repeatedly been recognized as an artist at various art jamborees.
She is one of the founders the ARTos Foundation, which has organized and hosted numerous events, lectures, exhibitions, workshops for the young and old, and a plethora of other cultural and scientific activities, with the participation of important artists, intellectuals, academics, researchers and scientists from Cyprus and abroad.
She has inspired and conducted workshops for young scientists, inventors, robotics designers, archaeologists, architects, theatre directors, writers, artists and navigators. She organized and created the Kid’s University aimed at shaping free-thinking individuals/citizens and cultivating “education for researchers”. This university encourages and fosters the participation of children from disadvantaged social groups with a view to their expanding their intellectual horizons and enabling them to feel that they are equal members of Cypriot society.
Paramount in her artistic activities is painting. In the pictures the artist presents us with the naive ideal world, in which all is simple, clear and in a gentle way, as in the imagination of children. Recall the familiar expression “out of the mouth’s of babes oft times comes gems”, it is possible to tell that Maria Papacharalambous tries to follow the way of truth. Children usually act intuitively and ignore technical approaches, using various materials which they have liked in the work, so Maria Papacharalambous uses in her works elements of collage and assemblage, creating three-dimensional pictures, unifiers and painting and ready made forms.
By using a set of art adaptations, Maria purposely simplifies art means and forms. For achievement of the greatest expressiveness the artist uses simple composition, the deformed picture close to the naive movement and bright, local colour.
Her series “ Subconscious Landscapes” in 1994 was selected by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural services and represented Cyprus at the European Biennale of young artists of the Mediterranean countries 94 in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2005 it was used at the double award experimental movie “A Stroll.”
The Series: “Abstract Narratives” (1989-91) led to a graduation with distinction and was exhibited in 1991 at the National Gallery of Greece, Athens, Greece.
Works from the series “Horizons: Vertically” can be found at the Ministry of Education and Culture, Central Bank collection, Bank of Cyprus, Alfa Bank collection, Larnaca Municipal Collection.
In her artwork collection “Horizons: Vertically” a baby elephant is playing with a ball, and the onlooker sees a happy self-sufficient character, accompanied by the surprising depth of green colour in the foreground. The colour calms us, giving us confidence about the natural and rationality of life. The red ball for the elephant which looms in the distance, gives rise to the hope that the secret dream will be sometime be realised.
In this work, throughout which the colour white is dominant, breaks the dark blue and huge quantity of various other colours, semitones and shades. The dream, the imagination which arises also indicates we are witnesses of this birth.
The series “Dream Traps” (1997) was in 1999 selected by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Services of the Republic of Cyprus to represent Cyprus at the XX International Biennale of Alexandria 99, in Egypt. In 2005 extracts from that series were used at the double award experimental movie “A Stroll”. In 2007 some others were used as visual intervention at the performance of the actress Katerina Loura.
Pictures from a set “Dream Traps” include an obvious game element. They are an important component as they are supposed to catch dreams. Dreams are remote yet obvious. Not fully realized, only starting to be shaped in one’s consciousness, but already fixed by the artist on canvas.. Works from this set have been specially created to hang in a bedroom and to ponder. When our dreams pass through the nonexistence of the local "pure" color of a picture, we can catch them in small handfuls to finally realize, them.
