THEATHENS ART GALLERY
Eleni Zouni: geometry of an intangible journey curated by Kostas Prapoglou

In her second solo exhibition at Athens Art Gallery, artist Eleni Zouni presents new works on paper and canvas, ranging from large-scale compositions to smaller formats.

Zouni’s painting practice unfolds as an unceasing enquiry into how perception evolves into a process that transforms the recording of thought’s flow. Her process always begins with a single point; sometimes arbitrary, sometimes precisely positioned, depending on the intensity of the conditions that shape and sculpt the present. This is not a mapping of reality, but of abstraction and subjectivity, where the imaginary and the instinctive engage in dialogue with the rigour of an underlying coded architecture.

In this fluid and ever-shifting realm, drawing becomes a tool for discovery. The artist does not seek to depict a predetermined scene but to develop a visual field where mental constructs gradually acquire material form. Composition emerges through a mechanism in which experiences, stimuli, and materials coalesce into anew dimension, maintaining a balance between precision and ambiguity.
Zouni explores the relationship between humans and time, sound, and their social and natural surroundings, not through linear narration, but by capturing the silent forces that act upon consciousness and shape it. Her lines do not simply outline forms. They register thought’s progression, movement’s rhythm, and the echo of an unseen vibration.

Her work resists the straightforward pairing of image and word. The psyche unveils an open field where forms and symbols evade fixed meanings, inviting the viewer into an ongoing, playful act of interpretation. Through a layering of different modes, colour reinforces the sense of mutability. It is light and shadow, sky and ground, substance and absence.

For Zouni, painting is an exercise in awareness and memory. Through physical engagement, gesture, and compositional exploration, each work arises as a sphere of negotiation between order and unpredictability. She does not record the visible, she transfigures it, translating vision into trace and emotion into expanse.

This tension between the immaterial and the tangible, the conscious and the unconscious, remains infinitely unresolved. Each work seems to hover in a state of ceaseless discovery, in a moment that precedes its final form. The drawing is never fully confined. Instead, it suggests new possibilities for perceiving space and time.

In an era where visual information is instantly accessible, Zouni proposes a different approach: one that returns to observation, to a silent engagement with surface and structure. Her works resist stasis. They are vessels of transformation, where matter and contemplation remain in perpetual flux. The point of departure is never the final destination. Instead, each work is an invitation to reassess, an urge to lose oneself in the pure experience of form and space.

This exhibition brings together a near-obsessive, penetrating study that presents painting not as an inactive imprint but as an ongoing trajectory of notion and sensation. The metaphysical meets the experiential, the familiar mutates into an uncharted landscape, and the final outcome dissolves as merely a surface that records another event. Rather, it becomes an event of understanding how existence inscribes itself into the timeless.

Ultimately, what comes forth is not just the power of the image but the handling of cognition itself. Zouni’s works act as a bridge between substance and absence, between stability and change. The viewer is not asked to decode but to feel, to wander through the visual experience, to discover their own truth within the lines, shadows, and colours. In this subtle conversation between artist and observer, the works are not conclusions but starting points, an invitation to see the world anew.