Her works are in search of a unifying principle, portraying the way the artist experiences reality
Despina Flessa
Connection with nature
Text: Αlexandra Koroxendis
The works of Despina Flessa (Athens, 1986) oscillate between the two-dimensional image and painting as a three-dimensional form, intertwine the reminiscence of the immaterial and of absence with materiality and the act of depiction, and stand as reenactments made of fragments of memory and of the artistic process. With a stripped-down approach, using a limited color gamut based on tetrachromacy, and with drawing as her starting-off point, the artist mainly uses graphite, clay, paper and wood, foregrounding the coexistence of strength and fragility, as well as a sense of preciousness that does not go hand in hand with rarity.
In many of her landmark works an image (often a black-and-white photo, usually of a landscape, taken by the artist herself) is distorted through various techniques, fragmented and combined with other photos. The sharpness of the image fades away, setting up a play between the positive and the negative of the photo. The artist’s tampering is carried on by applying drawings or motifs on the already processed image. This way, an existing landscape is transformed into a mediated representation, ending up as an imaginary topos. Shapes are gleaming in the backdrop, get entangled with each other or coated with graphite, creating a black surface, a place of absence and implicit presence.
“I am fixated on what remains of a process or of a past, how we deal and cope with what exists or had once existed,” she says. The dissolution of the form, the footprints of a place and the formations of nature indirectly echoe the artist’s concerns over the destruction or the spoiling of the environment, a thought she also conveyed through her participation in the collective exhibition The End of Landscape (curation: Christoforos Marinos) in 2024-2025, as well as in Resilient by Nature in 2023. The image is “evaporated”, sweeping along all the memories attached to it. In the series Folding Landscape II (2015), a minimal drawing on the upper part of the composition is deployed upon a monochromatic black surface, covered with layers of graphite. “I take interest in the notion of representation, the dynamics it develops as a fragment.” Her works are deconstructed and reconstructed to become integrated in a newly formed entity.
This approach is more than evident in the installation Remains (2015), where dispersed sculptural elements from graphite and clay are placed on the floor in order to form a fragmented architectural structure, evoking the milieu of an archaeological excavation or an accumulation of relics and nature fossils. Four years later, in her work Liquid Bones (2019), elements of organic shape, resembling seeds or foliage, are recombined in vegetal formations. Both her installations and mural paintings cry out the agony of rendering visibility to the vanishing, in an attempt for it to exist, to become palpable, to trigger a corporeal gaze, to unite the act of viewing with a sense of tangibility and corporeality. “Nature is inhabited by living, magical beings that exist in a different way than ours and get disintegrated by our transit,” stresses Despina Flessa.
I focus all of my attention to the palm, which symbolizes the destructive touch of mankind upon nature, while formulating the question of how to turn nature into the body of myself, how nature can be experienced in a more ‘visceral’, instinctive and primordial way.
The graphite coatings on the original image erase the preexisting space yet forge a new one along with a new materiality, thus activating the impression of a presence. The superposed layers of the graphite and the density of the writing curve the paper’s surface, causing the edges of the composition to fold. In addition, they emit a lustrous glow that adds a sense of depth to the monochromatic surface. The work resembles human skin in a state of folding and unfolding, opening and closing, revelation and concealment, like a flower that opens its blossom before closing it up again. These forms are depicted as flowing, as in the case of Landscape Tableaux (2016), and are endowed with a verticality, as if moving bottom-up and the opposite, abiding by and defying the laws of gravity at once. The sculptural form always emanates from the drawing, and the foldings often reproduce a drawing motif like in Crossing Nile (2022).
The interpenetration of elliptical organic shapes is a trait of her large-scale painting works as well, enhancing the feeling of corporeality and gesture. In a recent corpus of works where she tries out a “new form” by integrating the element of performance, Despina Flessa explores the corporeal-mental bond between human beings and nature, transforming the imprints of foliage and of other motifs inspired by past works into skin-colored molds. She goes on to photograph them and create photo collages through a subtle digital processing, which represent them embodied – like a transplant – in an open palm that looks as if produced by prosthetic surgery.
“I focus all of my attention to the palm, which symbolizes the destructive touch of mankind upon nature, while formulating the question of how to turn nature into the body of myself, how nature can be experienced in a more ‘visceral’, instinctive and primordial way. On one hand, the palm can be interpreted as a map deciphered through the primeval language of the oracular art. On the other hand, it can be perceived as a member of the post-human body, an offspring of biotechnology, that binds together the artificial and the natural, a form of science that examines the mechanisms of nature as seen through its philosophical prism and with the importance attributed to it by the rituals and the tenets of other cultures. By alluding to a kind of alchemy, the image of the palm also implies imagination as the meeting area between art and science.” Her works are in search of a unifying principle, portraying the way the artist experiences reality. With this empirical approach as her starting-off point, Despina Flessa prioritizes a method of work pervaded by a spirituality, with the ultimate aim of bringing forth an unfeigned and innate truth.
Following her studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts (having enrolled in Tassos Christakis’ workshop), during which, and with the support granted by the State Scholarships Foundation, she attended painting classes at the Edinburgh College of Art, Despina Flessa obtained her Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Not a year had gone by since her graduation when she showcased her work as part of a joint exhibition (alongside Dimitris Efeoglou) at Zoumboulakis gallery, before hosting a solo exhibition at Moscow’s pop/off/art gallery, where she will return in June 2025 for another individual exhibition.
She has taken part in many collective exhibitions held both in Greece abroad, among which stand out the following: Open-Ended (curation: Georgia Liapi), Eidyllia Odos (curation: Maria Maragkou) hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete and the Technopolis City of Athens, The State of Emergency Has Become the Rule at the art venue HAUNT//frontviews e.V. in Berlin, Thessaloniki’s ΜΟΜus-Experimental Center for the Arts (within the framework of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival) and the Contemporary Greek Art Institute, having also been awarded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artworks Fellowship Program Artworks.
Ever since 2015 she has been an active member of the international Berlin-based art collective frontviews, which aims to highlight eco and up-to-the-minute issues through art, as well as to promote the teaming up and partnership both between artists and between art venues that channel art to a wider audience.
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