Follow your art gallery presents the solo exhibition "Sparkling Dark" by Mary Schina, on the occasion of the celebration of 10 years since its first presentation at Skoufa gallery, in Athens. This series of works appears to swift from her earlier view of light and nature. Until then, her interest was focused more on rendering light through colour, through its transparency and movement; but in this body of work she distances herself from colour focusing on the particularities of black.
Irene Orati, art director of J. F Costopoulos foundation and former curator of the Alpha Bank art collection, observes:
"Schina has added to the printmaking process and extra stage, by choosing to use aquatint to treat her own black and white digital photographs that were all taken during summer, at night with full moon. This process poses two significant challenges to the artist. Initially, she has to work with the effect that the light creates without the mediation of colour, with which she has worked almost exclusively the past decades. Furthermore, by choosing to work with black and white photography, she goes back to the fundamentals of printmaking which is the relation between black and white."
Mary Schina mentions:
"Camera and photography entered the field of artistic expression, particularly in printmaking, during the first quarter of the 20th century. That was an era when visual artists searched for opportunities and studied ways of improving the clarity of their expression. From that day forward, photography allowed to capture a rare phenomenon, to record the fleeting moment, the rapid or random changes, even the movement of light. In other words, it has provided man with testimony to the visual "truth" of life's external reality through time.
By transferring these phenomena to a copper plate, through photoetching, unique artistic results can be achieved. So today, its magical ability to record and enhance the visual image, has made photography an essential tool in the practice of Art. Through the use of aquatint and oxidation of copper plate, one can succeed great depth of black and many tones of grey, increasing the potential for a variety of results in art composition and expression."
