Women; at times immersed in the blue of the sea with a body barely visible,
recollections of a mythical beast; at times free of roots, a brushstroke, a note of
an erotic pose; at times without body as such, just a face, just eyes, a blue dot
staring at you with no guilt or intention to judge.
In her first solo exhibition in Brussels, Vasso Tzouti chooses a place infused
with Greek music and song to present the woman of today, inspired by Greek
lyrics that enter her work as a momentary memory to express woman’s
strength and fragility, unanswered love, loneliness, the anguish to say what
remains forever unsaid, the void between words.
The song – as a title on her large-scale pieces, as a speech bubble or as
prose – seems to serve in her work like music theatre text and her painted
figures like protagonists in an imaginary play.
The forms are chaotic compositions of violent strokes, painted bluntly, swiftly;
pure colors often straight out of the tube cover the surface of her unframed,
roughly cut canvas. Forms sometimes dynamic and absolute, sometimes
fragile and otherworldly that draw from pictures of family and friends staged
by the artist in poses inspired by films, sports, celebrities or from images in
fashion magazines or ads, cutouts of figures as repeat patterns on paper.
The artist follows the intricate meanders of psyche and asks whether this
psyche is male, or female—or other. Her works mirror and reflect extreme
emotional states, everyday forms of behavior and perceptions of senses,
mirrored and transformed in the patterns of the unconscious. Tzouti’s
paintings take you to the bouzoukia of paradise—the place, where you always
wanted to be but were afraid to ask if it existed.
Vasso Tzouti studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts and theatre at
the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She lives and works in
Athens, Greece.

* nightclub where the bouzouki is played

 

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