Ιnher new solo exhibition at Batagianni Gallery, Lila Polenaki presents paintings of various dimensions from different moments of her creative career. A group of objects from her recent involvement with ceramics will tenderly interact with her paintings.

Of tender things (von zarten Dingen)

This is the title of a small collage by German artist Hanna Hoch.

An old friend of hers from Berlin sent it to LP; “I saw it and it reminded me of you,” she wrote.

Through the ever-flowing stream of memory, this title was also attached to the present exhibition as LP integrates, with sophisticated collage techniques, a variety of materials in her paintings. Textile and paper are her main components: old laces, and other handicrafts, once beloved clothes, various rags, wrapping papers, notebook pages and sketches of her own, handwritten letters, printed material, and much more. At times, these things, marked by time and charged by their previous use, find their way to her by chance or are carefully collected, and in a way constitute her visual vocabulary. They become part of a personal register of images and inspire her endless attempts to imagine articulations and articulate images about female subjectivity.

During the painting process, LP disassembles and reassembles them, overlays and imitates them, to eventually transform them, through her personal idiom, into images that can be read as imaginary space of memory, as mental landscapes where sensations of body, memory, decay and loss poetically emerge. Personally, she mostly experiences the painting process in its redemptive dimension as a separation exercise, a ritual placing of the material within the living space of art.