Pink Mink: new exhibition opening at O Gallery

Local artist Maria Trillidou is showcasing her latest body of work titled Pink Mink at The O Gallery this month. The exhibition includes drawings of plant-like organisms on paper and opens on Saturday.

Having held several solo showcases in the past, Pink Mink is Trillidou’s first since 2021. She has exhibited pieces at the Larnaca gallery numerous times in the past as part of group exhibitions. This time, she returns solo to present colourful and plant-like art.

“Maria Trillidou’s painterly worlds hold carnivorous plants, chthonic beings and tentacular creatures. Her masterful technique renders unexpected materialities and textures – like the furry coating of pink mink flowers, or the almost translucent, ready-to-sting spikes of cacti,” comments art theorist Evagoras Vanezis.

Drawing on contemporary culture as a collective body fascinated with the making of fearsome things cute, and often revealing the dark underside of ‘the beautiful’, her compositions mix the careful application of line and shape with the wet and rupture-like application of colour.

The artist’s worlds hover between “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come”.

In her most recent works, different mouths appear on unexpected, hybrid bodies. A tetraptych suggestively titled Hellmouth depicts the open mouth of a big mammal that is attached to tangled plants, becoming one with them. Replete with a large tongue and the size of its teeth’s surface, the opening reminds of an active yet deserted space.

In medieval iconography, the open mouths of enormous monsters represent the often elaborately decorated gates of hell: a spatialisation of expectation, the suspended moment of entry into the unknown. This unknown is understood as the devouring inside of an ‘other’, a space of meaningless decomposition often referred to as ‘the belly of the beast’. When imagining this ‘here’ that decomposes, the feeling conjured up is that of a monstrous sublime that we cannot fully comprehend. In Trillidou’s work, these mouths are more like desiring machines, ready to interact with something, producing unexpected combinations and new bodies.

In between drawing and painting, the works provide open ground for exploring what our eyes could see if vision stepped beyond the recognition of humanistic concerns – including finitude – on nature. Drawing is after all a desiring process, a way to move through time and space, a tool with which to produce new ways of engaging with the reality of all things that remain unknown to us.

Pink Mink

Solo exhibition by Maria Trillidou. March 11-April 1. The O Gallery, Larnaca. Opening night: 7pm. Wednesday-Saturday: 10am-1pm and 4pm-7pm. Sunday: 3pm-7pm. Tel: 99-659202. www.the-ogallery.com