Epistoli 1-9

Epistoli 1-9

In her series of small paintings Epistoli, Klitsa Antoniou constructs a visual space where memory and materiality, absence and presence, are inseparably intertwined. The texts she draws upon—letters written within prison walls, uncovered through her meticulous research—go beyond the function of mere written records: they are fragments of lives caught in suspension, trapped between reclaimable memory and irretrievable silence.
Painted on dense, corporeal surfaces, these works resist erasure and invite the viewer into a mode of interpretation that transcends the intellect and engages the body. Here, the act of decoding becomes an intimate, ethical endeavor—an attempt to recover the forgotten, the silenced, those pushed to the margins by history and circumstance.
This is a slow, deliberate excavation of historical layers, where meaning emerges gradually through sustained engagement. Absence becomes tactile—something negotiable, present. The lives evoked in Epistoli are situated in spaces of exclusion, yet even in their stillness, they reveal latent possibilities for other modes of existence.