In order for pieces of art to be understood in meaningful ways, their surroundings must be taken into account. Ariana Papademetropoulos, a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, reminds us of this. Papademetropoulos is a new-wave surrealist who was born in 1990. Growing up, she had always been inspired by interiors. She was raised in a family of architects, and she always wanted to become one too. Despite this, her parents encouraged her to invest in her future as an artist. They claimed that by being an artist, she would not be constrained by the ordinary tethers of the architectural world. She could build her very own, and that is what she began to do.
Papademetropoulos dropped out of high school at 17 and began her Bachelors of Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts, earning her degree in 2012. During her time in art school, she understood painting as a form of protest. She was the only painter in her class, and she made it a point to stray away from the minimalist curricula. Papademetropoulos took inspiration from pieces of her real life. She explains that she was often inspired by motifs in postcards and magazines, like boats and flowing water. Her work has its roots in realism but expands into a magical realm of her own design upon its development on the canvas.
Papademetropoulos’ earlier work delves into multiple new realities within one setting. She explains that she always begins by stripping the painting down and introducing magic in her own way. This perspective and its application to her art is especially apparent in paintings that she had at the Vito Schnabel gallery’s exhibition, “Unweave A Rainbow.” This show was named after a John Keats poem called “Lamia.” Papademetropoulos explains that this inspiration comes from Keats’ mechanical models of the beauty of nature. Here, she dismantles the notion that scientific innovation is the answer to every mystical question that puzzles us. She wants people to know that mystery permeates innovation and discovery, and it always will.
When the observer encounters her work for the first time, objective and subjective lines of reality are almost unintelligible. There are unique cascades of ripples, bubbles and blurs, all adding to her superb sense of illusion. Her art offers the questions, “What sense of reality do I understand as truth, and why?” She understands the creation of these pieces as a necessary form of indulgence. In her personal artistic experience, she knows art to be a surrealist display of uncertainty.
She claims that after the pandemic, people began to realize how fallible the rigid structures of society really are. By creating these immersive pieces, she enlightens individuals to new versions of non-linear life. One of my personal favorites from Papademetropoulos’ vault is her work, “Espulsione dalla discoteca (2020).” This loosely translates to, “expulsion from the disco.” The title and the subject matter of this piece encapsulate the richness of art as exploration. The piece is set with a simplistic rural background and there is a haze of orange dust stretching through to the foreground, partially covering a wooden barn structure. What the eye is drawn to, however, is a free-floating bubble off to the right of the orange cloud. This bubble contains a world that is unfamiliar to the viewer upon first glance: but the longer you look, the more you see. There is a certain emotional availability here that is key to Papademetropoulos’ work. She invites you to peer in and to escape to a more vulnerable place. To her, something as slight as a bubble contains multitudinous possibilities.
