Marianna Katsoulidi uses oils and painting rollers to create a whole world – moulded as a dream – of divine justice, selflessness and affection. She uses images from porcelains – some distant chlidhood memory – and brings them to life in magical stories. The figures are neat and simple, sometimes with an almost dancelike movement and other times rigid and frozen in the passing of time. Unlike reality, in her paintings man and nature coexist harmoniously; her animals represent the joy of life, purity and innocence, and the people she paints stand for the fundamental principals of ethics. She creates her own iconography and her own zoomorphic symbolism: the dog symbolises faith, the dove freedom, the goat fertility and strength but also tragedy, the horse patience, loyalty and service. And each person is attributed a quality depending on the animal that stands besides him. The title of this series, ‘Innocence – Restart Painting’ refers to the need to return to innocence in order to be able to start once again from the beginning. It’s a counter proposal to the already standing art, because it does not capture the world as it is but rather suggests a better one, centered around certain age-old principles and values.
Marianna Katsoulidi’s recall of innocence
