Maria Chaniotaki is a stage designer. But she is also a poet, expressing herself through fairy tales and painting. Her multi-faceted nature is part of a unique expressive sensitivity.

Immaterial, dreamlike, shimmering, the Houses in the Prairies, the Flowers in the Fields, the Echo in the Air… all spread throughout her new work. With stresses, feathers and colors in dust, Space is captured – the Light in the colorful Flowers, Motion in the Swan, Sound in the Echo. With transparencies, Time is captured…

The constant transformations of the materials expand into transformations of people, often individuals from her personal life. Human forms interpret flowers, and faces with emotional or symbolic weight are transformed into Saints. Nature is given a human face, the Saints are humanized and Faces become Myths.

She honors the female element with religious facets, not only in the four episodes of the Original Sin Eva, but also in her multileveled work The Saint. The elegiac form of the Saint, multidimensional in its execution and its conception, is trapped in a Byzantine environment, becoming timeless.

The exchange of two-dimensional surfaces, like the golden halo, with three-dimensional elements brings to mind the works of Europeans painters during the transition from symbolism to Art Nouveau. Artistic style meets its source of inspiration, the verses of the symbolism poet Malarme.

Behind the studied transformations, which are revealed under impressionist depictions of nature, and behind symbolist expansions, the audience is faced with a worldview full of sensitivity and worries…

Ergina Xydou, Art Historian