for Nikos Kryonidis

Thalia Stephanidou

Art Historian/Curator

"...at that time, the artist was free... On a wall with a fresh souvah, 

splashed with shiny sandal* or fermented with milk and saffron**, he painted someone 

crossing with weary feet a meadow meadow strewn with white asphodel, 

someone on whose eyelids all the Trojan War rests..."

[ The Critic as Creator, Oscar Wilde ]

"...look at the mimosas*** I see. Imagine the mimosas. 

What you don't see.... The mimosa is the painter's nymph..."

 [ The Last Painting or Portrait of God, Hélène Cixous ]

Nikos Kryonidis discovers and deposits, incessantly, shapes of thought or feelings as forms of visual expression with the determination of an adult and childlike enthusiasm at the same time. His "painterly" texts function as sketches of visual discourse that form episodes of graphisms, sometimes implying and sometimes emphatically emphasizing the primary tools of the act of painting. These are undoubtedly developments of experimentation and gymnastics, attempts to map an associative narrative, even impressions of successive patterns that multiply the perception of the enigma, expanding its interpretative potential. His creaturely landscapes, similar to masses of colour suspended in a kind of equilibrium on the canvas, function as geographies of the imaginary that seem to trap shapes of flocks of birds in fluid lines of the horizon. Again, perhaps they convey emotions of psychic order from an inner vision, without forming anything immediately recognizable. 

I had previously identified his improvisational practice as "happenings on paper" and as networks of color flows and fleeting images or words that promote and foster independent thought and the polysemy of painterly performance. A painting act that struggles to trace the present of the moment in that elusive, erotic and playful condition where the imperative of "come further away" - "go closer" is confessed. 

Today, mainly due to his recurring obsessions and selective retrospectives, I call his personal idiom a visual diary of his purely personal and experiential wanderings, a diary beyond goals and final destination.Nikos Kryonidis's poetics moves in search of the inexplicable and indeterminate, proposing incessant transmutation, a prolonged and constant delirium for what is a trace of memory and emotion intertwined with creatures of the imagination and with what is here and now present. In an attempt to decipher the poetics of this type, Nietzsche's aphorism "you have to guess the painter to understand the image" helps us to suspect the dialectical relationship between the image produced as the body of the painting and the body of the creator who produces it. 

Thalia Stephanidou, Art Historian/Critic - Curator

_ _ _

* Fossil pigment of intense red [ sandyx or sandykos ]

** Strong yellow pigment derived from the stamens of the saffron plant [ saffron or saffron(s) ] 

*** Mimosa is a genus of plants of the order Mimosa. The name mimosa, feminine of mimos, is of Greek origin. The best known species of the genus is mimosa pudica, also known as touch-me-not (honteuse femelle/sensitive).