You want to put a candle in front of her works Eleonora Stathopoulou. And stand silently in the silent wave of beauty and truth. Like altars of common memory, icons of childhood and sea adventures, projects for her they are “made” in a primitive, manual way. Spirit and matter merge together in these tactile narratives presented to us by Eleonora Stathopoulou in the heart of Athens, in the mysteriously beautiful space of “Fotagogos”, there, in the background of Stoas Kurtakis, at the end of Kolokotroni Street.

Among the books of the Rodakio publishing house, within this intellectual ecosystem created by Giulia Tsiakiri, the works of Eleonora Statopoulou shine like self-luminous niches carved there from time immemorial.

By itself, a large object, visual unity Eleonora Stathopoulou invites you to consider it as evidence that goes beyond art. It is a complex gesture based on a deep philosophical and psychonematic connection with the intangible trace of a place. It looks like mining. With the title “The Sea Brings Them”, Eleonora Stathopoulou pays homage to maritime affairs, stories of the sea and the secrets of the seabed, the trajectories of lives lost in dark waters, wedding wreaths made frames, and cigarettes smoked in brotherhood and childhood memories, in anti-heroic stories about immortal sea heroes and laurel heroes of the 21st century, in St. Nicholas, in embroidery, in fragments of the domestic economy and in Homeric reflections of time.

Eleonora Statopoulou, with her theatrical education, documents all this as a scenographic gesture that has flesh and blood. Like a slice of Greece that moves in its heartbreaking truth, the works in this exhibition cause cracks in confidence. They are reminiscent of the very structure of this place as a coherent field of sentient and living beings, a phrase that I withheld from my guide Mania Zusi. Eleonora Stathopoulou is an artist. He collects firewood, masts and lanterns thrown away by the sea, wanders through the bazaars for fragments of beauty. Now he lives on the pulse of a small town far from Athens, building structures like an iconostasis, making thrones and thrones, giving new life to frames that are works of art in themselves. He creates his own pantheon, the sailors of the primitive maritime culture. Sailors and sailors, sad and smiling, like tombstones or smiling faces in an oval frame. He makes them interlocutors with saints of Christianity and Homeric heroes, with 21st century protopalicars and with student memories in staged photographs.

Based on the culture and technique of iconography, Eleonora Stathopoulou in a heartbreaking way connects the urban and folk character of the Greeks, converses with the holiness of matter, separates it from its ephemeral life and gives it the value of saint relics.

This osmosis of sacred matter and tangible spirit gives us an aesthetic of rare beauty. And this is the “bloody” aesthetics, the aesthetics of the mental mine.

“Fotagogos”, Kolokotroni 59B, inside Stoas Kurtakis, until 29.04.