Outlines
         The eighties reproposed the necessity of
a pictorial culture, as the American philosopher
Arthur C. Danto clearly states.
He examines the return of painting on the artistic
scene in the light of a "refined post-modernist
adventure".
On one side a path is opened towards a decisive
figuration which, after a long period of default,
seeks alternative routes by recuperating pictorial
representation.
On the other side, abstract painting, defined
by Clement Greenberg as the "inevitability of history",demands to be no longer identified with purity or with analytical and aseptic rigour.
Both sides, therefore, reject stereotypical
connotations: the figure attempts to draw from
the wholeness of existence while abstraction repels
the ghost of clarity and geometric formality.
Thanks to these "dismissals" a new painting has been developed which moves its principles towards soft frontiers and substitutes the sterile
dichotomies with a dialectic conception which fades their outlines.
In this pictorial environment, structured on
complementarity rather than conflict, is positioned
Eleni Dori’s research.
             The starting point is the everyday object.
In her first paintings during the eighties, she deals
mainly with objects taken from the environmental
context such as windsocks used in airports or saws
used in factories.
In this proposition, however, there is no
demystifying intention or wish to
indict fetishism or conformism.
There is no more concern with an art
which intends to emphasise everyday obsessions.
The object is rather considered as a primary
element which becomes "curious" since it
reminds us of something other than itself.
Looking at it carefully,the object is an open
form which determines a chain reaction of
metamorphic states; beneath its appearance one
can see, repeating Max Bense’s words, a different
"reality" that is pictorially evidenced
by lines, contours or shadows which widen its
significance.
           Deviations, shifts, jumps, create at the
completion of the painting process a structure
entirely different from the initial one,although
the distinctive character of uniqueness
still remains.
Dori singles out in the object an internal
life which allows it to be regenerated; she
puts forward a kind of a recurrent skeleton-form,
the cylinder, a geometric form which is characterised, apart from its equilibrium and harmony, by stability but which can also be manipulated and elaborated in
an infinite game of combinations and postures.
In that way painting acquires the faculty to
suggest rather than to define,leaving plenty
of space to imagerie, overcoming the ambiguities
and the flatness of habit.
The image does not undergo a process leading
to the loss of its context but, on the contrary,
it immaterialises, becoming evident only by its
outlines, being crossed by memories and oblique,
asymmetric, references.
The shadow becomes the alter ego of the form, its
enigmatic and unexpressed double.
The narrative frame extends in a free space where
the pictorial language is continuously reformulated.
All is evident and yet mysterious, real but indefinite.
Painting is revealed as an adhesive material capable of an evocative "story-telling", always remaining on the border line between the definition of the image and the concept, between narrative and contingency.
Such an approach towards reality is probably also
influenced by the confrontation of the artist with
cultures of various countries,the messianic classicism of Greece (her country of origin), the peculiar mixture of aesthetics and ethics of England (where she studied and worked) and the crucible of the        Apollonian and Dionysian of Italy (where she lives today).
These matrices converge into a research which
requests a dynamic context, with clear connotations,
interweaved with synestesias and chromatic impastos.
The canvas is often of large format, almost as if the
painting wishes to invade space and find a breath in
the universe.Colour is never chosen beforehand: it grows with
slow layers and at the end the whole surface
is covered by a "veil" which in parts seems to
come off to reveal the traces of an indelible origination.
The painting retains in itself the þow of time and
of events, a patina of the antique, images that seem
to vanish unexpectedly and be reborn in
a reflection of suggestions and a glare of lights.