Aphrodite Litti

Α.Litti in Wonderland

14.12.07 - 09.02.08

Afroditi Litti’s Wonderland is a realm in which the dreamlike, the fleeting, the magical and the bizarre coexist alongside—but never collide with—the palpable, the material, the real and the solid. A cat poking out of a clump of trees pulling faces, a kaleidoscope of butterflies, a rabbit, ducks, beetles and lizards, a crowd of outsize playing card/mirrors and the girlish form compose a World which could be straight out of Lewis Carroll or the imagination of a child (no age limits imposed).

A Litti’s work clearly contains echoes of 17th-century Vanitas motifs such as the butterfly, a symbol of the ephemeral, and the pack of cards, a reminder that fate is inextricably intertwined with the unexpected, the transient and the volatile.

Quite apart from its thematic depth, however, A Litti’s is mainly a sculpted world. Heavy metals like iron and bronze are de-materialized through the addition of multicoloured glass tesserae. The sheen and iridescence of her works and the reflections on their surfaces miraculously convey the delicate, fragile nature of her creatures, even though—as objects—their bulk and weight are far from negligible.

Litti’s Potnia Thiron show also includes two photographs from “The enigmatic princesses”. Depicting two little girls in Santa Claus costumes bursting into the artist’s house, the works play with the concepts of gender, disguise and the colour red—with all it can symbolically entail.

A Litti’s environments combine the surreal with nature and put the way in which the sculpted object relates to space, light and time to superlative use. Viewed through a Christmas prism, her works’ colours and glitz, the playing cards and the Santa Claus costume, the concepts of the dream, desire and fate, are exhilarating; they fill the viewer with enthusiasm and throw open the gates into Wonderland.
Eugenios Trivizas, professor of Criminology at Reading University, wrote the catalogue introduction “Two ‘A’s in wonderland”.