If I was asked about the identity of my work, I would say it has multiple identities. What I find to be the cohesive element in it is quest. My quests are connected, my subjects not necessarily. I use as a starting point to my thoughts the structure of my house.
I grew up in a house that had a window at the front looking out into the street, and from the backside you went out to a secret flowery yard. My entire work moves along this analogy. The fluctuations in my life fit between these two points, the front window and the backyard, within this corridor that connects them both. Sometimes it is the view on the street that prevails, and sometimes, it is the yard. And I keep moving endlessly back and forth between them looking for the way, the means to link the impressions.
I give this trajectory a name: "VIA:" Each journey is a different journey, and the choice of journey each time leads me to the painterly expression, to my painterly consummation.
In the course of past twenty years I have been preoccupied with how the theme aspect may be attached or detached from the visual aspect. This is what I would like to share with you here.
The starting point for the Tales of Paradox was this work I made in 2003, after the loss of my family. It started from the feeling of the void left behind by the imprint of the absent human body on the couch where they used to sit. So in this work, which is about physical sensations, there may be this feeling that a person, their body, has just vanished into thin air.
My keen interest in the painting of Outsiders and the painting of 19th-century symbolism dates from back then, as does my long commitment to the use of pastel. They are works I coming from the inside, autonomous, self-contained; narratives. I approach personal mythology through brief self-contained narratives. The body appears dominant, not just as a whole but as part of the body which acquires its own presence, autonomy and reality. With pastels I retain the feeling of touch; I invoke the familiarity of sensations.
Promenade / Bathers: The social space of gathering and summer leisure. In the black and white drawings, the humans-eidolons are actually in social interaction. They walk on the beach, they swim in the sea but, at the same time, what we see is a reality in reverse, the reality of a world in X-ray. The figure defines the space; there is no security of the surrounding space. The space is black. But is the black void? Since black is your starting point and there is no surrounding space, you are already in a subjective, inner space. You enter the darkroom of memory, which can bring the image to light with greater precision or may keep it elliptic. Within the darkroom of memory a reality is being created again.I experiment with elliptical writing, negative-positive, using the same media as in the Tales of Paradox; chalk pastel on dark paper.
 Transcribing the emotion and the space: The funerary stelae in the Museum of Thebes triggered a series of works which link two places, an abandoned garden in Kifissia, Athens and the Cemetery of Brooklyn.
In my work I have continuously sought ways to explore the element of transformation. I wanted in some way to free the initial image from the compromise of its medium. I wanted a dialogue among photography, engraving, and the surface of the print. It is via that transcription that my work with the title VIA: was born, an intersection of time and poetry.
I started searching for a printing method closer to the monotype, which I shall use in the next stages of my research as a basis/starting point for painting. In the spirit of play, I transferred the photographs to sandpaper surfaces, utilizing the density of the grain to intervene in the surface and to cause it to fade -- to create the sensation of time that slowly distorts and dissolves the image.  I was drawn to sandpaper by its density; there is this sheen in its texture which conveys a stone quality on paper.
The Collector and the City: The artist's feelings towards the collector are not always reverent; they are mixed. He may be seen as a godsend, he may be seen upside down. The "collector" could also be the viewer in me; the second body in me which can see my work. In purely morphological terms, I prepare a paste; a mass of colour made of glitter with metal filings and pastel shavings and placed over a silkscreen depicting the collector's figure. It is a surface that I am attacking; I don't keep my distance. I adopt in this series of portraits the script of the city, the graffiti, the anarchy of writing; my interest returns in the printmaking surface which is covered and transformed into a unique image. In some secret way, the city's contemporary aesthetic comes out in these works. And glitter is an aesthetic of the colour with something fake, something excessive about it; but we like this excess, we like to pump up our emotion.
I face the fluidity of the world through my painting, using material and colour The reaction to change may be the main element of transitionality; people's interaction with their surroundings. This found an expression in my work through an explicit turn towards matter created by the two basic colours, blue and red, which seem to be in constant motion.
From my early work entitled Corridor Passage Route and until the most recent Fluidity, I have kept track of my personal identity as a person in transit, moving across a city full of the prints of others. Red and blue oils dominate this phase of my work and induce a sense of euphoria, something like coming to terms with change.
                                                                     Pelagia Kyriazi