Michela Papavassiliou, contemporary abstract figurative painting

Perhaps it goes without saying that for me art is not just a primary need, it has always been my way of living, breathing, looking at things. My father, a surrealist painter, was certainly my Master of Art and Life. I remember when I was just 4 years old when he raised me in his arms to read the landscape pictorially with me. “There you put the whites, in those shadows you put the colors all together, because black does not exist as it is the mix of the colors that inhabit your brush.”

This is a necessary premise to understand my painting, my propensity to put on paper all the things that I have an urgent and unstoppable need to say, almost under dictation, as if I didn’t have the time to communicate everything. My relationship with the paper support also has deep roots since Petros had a printing house where some of the catalogs and posters that have made the history of part of our contemporary art were printed; Magritte, de Chirico, Andy Warhol, the list could be long. With the residues of the press, colored papers, very long strips of print waste, I built the foundations of my artistic world, made not only of shapes, ideas, projects, but also and above all of spaces, lights and smells. The scent of raw paper, the texture of Japanese paper against the light or in my hands, are inspirations difficult for me to decipher then, but certainly very clear today.


Michela Papavassiliou
Jul 31, 2021

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