After Dinner
domoBaal contemporary art
3 John Street
London WC1N 2ES

9th September 2004 - 9th October 2004

After dinner is an installation of 365 drawings made on papers, photographs, wine bottles and plastic containers referring to private time and space. These images - including numerous text pieces - constitute an intense visual catalogue of emotions together with their myriad reflections. Poised on a knife-edge between the specific and the arbitrary, the drawings evoke an illusory aura as diagrams of ideas are joined with layers of thought and memory, drawn with adoration on a variety of sensual surfaces.

Eva Karapanou's fascination with the immediacy and directness of the drawing process goes back to her childhood. What was then her way of describing 'life' and reassuring herself becomes now the platform to achieve integrity of the soul, savour solitude and reconstruct her 'identity' after the invasion of the day. Textured, sharply contrasted and engaging, her drawings conjure up independent worlds and record passions and utopias as they develop in the area of tension between the abstract and the figurative.

The artist is interested in neuroscientists' beliefs that emotions are triggered from brain sites and consequently feelings are interactive perceptions. Her work also comments on our increasing preoccupation with how we feel and our attempts to manipulate 'feelings'. Her drawings are hanging from rows of photographs of clouds and among them we see mineral water, bubble bath and detergent bottles stuck on the wall. The so-called mood altering drug is present too, a cross of alchohol bottles on the floor by the fireplace.

Included in this exhibition, a big graffiti drawing reading 'just feel it' - named after cliche advertisement slogansdepicts the human brain. After dinner the feeling brain parties with pain and pleasure each and every day. Eva Karapanou loves that chemistry.