My work: "The parade", Acrylics on YTONG Block
My work , an installation for Phytologies-Topologies
Spiroulina’s portrait (paper chromatograghy)
“Deep down everything is shapeless”
Art and science, through different routes, reach the same conclusions. Besides, the fundamental laws of nature, in their absolute beauty, are directly linked to aesthetics.
Referring indeed to painting and chemistry, even the means used in each one of them, are completely in accord with one another.
There is the painting studio and the laboratory, the chemist’s workbench and the painter’s easel, the sink, the stained apron, the drafts, the notes and the archives. The preparation of the palette and the experimental samples, the creative chaos and the tidying up afterward.
Inspiration, achieved after strenuous contemplation, destroys the boundaries of the cognitive fields and represents reality beyond the apparent. This is the moment the creation is really born – when the scientist/artist moves beyond the world of the senses to grasp the truth with his/her mind.
Cubism transformed the portrait to a figure made out of triangles, squares, semicircles and circles… It used geometry as a language of exploration into the deeper structure of shapes. I decided to compose – or, better yet, decompose – the portrait of three vegetal organisms, by using a method of chemical analysis, paper chromatography, and capture their souls through spots of anthocyanins, xanthophyll and of other such beautiful, poetic beings.
In this space, I expose the “successful” portraits of three plants (blueberry, red cabbage, spirulina), one of my many failed attempts to analyse carrot and some material from the processes followed and the attempts made.
I want to particularly thank my good friend, and chemist, Mr. Dimitris Chrissafidis, as without his help and his laboratory equipment, I would not have made it.
Maria Pastra
