Preview: New solo exhibition in Athens

How To Blue The Yellow or The Idea of Things

If there is a strong thematic axis in the work of Rania Rangou, it lies in the way we perceive reality and the world. It is perception itself that opens up the possibility of interpreting the world…

…images of the past are reconstructed and installed in the present, or in some indeterminate elsewhere—a place both recognizable and profoundly internal, unknown.”In her new body of work, the shape of ideas not only persists but is explicitly stated in the exhibition’s general title: The Idea of Things. Guided by Plato’s ‘theory of ideas’, the idea of things becomes the idea of ideal things—ideas as realities, the “truly existing beings,” in contrast to their appearance and imperfect reflections in the sensory world, which the artist perceives as shifting sand. With her personal painterly idiom sharpened even further, she articulates her mood and conceptual concerns. “Through this series of works,” she states, “I refer to humanity’s need to withdraw from the surrounding noise and to seek its own essential points—those dictated by the self, which differentiate each of us from others.” Here, withdrawal marks a turning point. Rangou’s idiom unfolds at the intersection of painting and new-media experience….

…Never ceasing to experiment with medium and form, Rangou enters a hybrid space where reality is deconstructed and reconstituted. The real is not neutralized, yet its forms are inscribed within a new, enigmatic mirror image—appearing as both itself and other, here and elsewhere. This is not fantasy but a merging of the real with the non-real, the unconscious with the conscious. Surprise, dream, paradox, and enigma emerge from her images, describing a state in which the self confronts itself..

…Rangou’s paradoxical reality and her deconstruction evoke an indeterminate space-time where everything can—or perhaps has already—happened. For her, painting is an open field: heterogeneous elements find their place and coexist without restriction, exploring questions of identity, memory, ideas, perceptions, daily life, and collective experience, as they have been shaped and reshaped through mythology, history, philosophy, the media, and fiction. The human being is detached from the environment—alone, with oneself..

Thanos Stathopoulos

(excerpt from the exhibition text)