From 1980 up to 1990, Art Textile Period

a) Catalogue 1985
Text - Excerpts from the analysis and presentation of V. Massoura works, Zygos No. 60/1983, by Chrysanthos Christou, professor of the history of modern art at the University of Athens.

... Alter her exceptional success in the gra­phic arts and painting, which showed an absolute command of technique, as well as α personal morphoplastic idiom, Massoura became interested in the craft of weaving, of tapestry making, and in 1978 went to Paris to study. In succeeding years she has devoted more of her time to tapestry and has achieved compositions which are re­markably expressive from all points of view. After particularly demanding effort, which began with the study of the techniq­ue, she proceeded to works in which are combined, in α marνelous manner, sure­ness of creation and dynamism of form, α wealth of invention with the flawnessness of composition and an exploitation of the textures of materials with the quality of their expressive language. Massoura uses all the materials - jute, sisal, lίnen, wool, hemp, grass, all vegetable fibers - without confining herself tο these alone. Frequen­tly, tο realize her goal, she inserts pieces of wood and thick rope, while of the natural colors of her materials she adds other, arti­ficial ones, which results in α widening of the expressive possibilίties of her work. Weaving, tapestry, is an age-old craft set apart by the particular difficulties the artist finds in bringing her intentions to fruition. In addition, the art of weaving encompas­ses an endeavor which is more clearly bound to life, i.e., it more successfully combines the functional necessities and the characteristics of usefulness with the ex­pressive requirements. Ιt also must be no­ted that Massoura does not simply make the designs, the starting point as it were, and then leave the final  outcome to the work of others. She handles all stages of work by herself...

...The spontaneity of Massoura's inspira­tion and the purity of her compositions can be easily ascertained in every category of her artistic creation and all the phases of her onging endeavor. In each category of her work the reviewer is struck by her con­sistency of intention and the sincerity of her morphoplastic language. The basic cha­racteristic of all her endeavors has been her ability to transform her intentions into morphoplastic values. Through the applica­tion of a wide variety of antitheses, forms and colors, classical and modern features, material and space, she has achieved ex­ceptionally expressive results. From the strictest constructivist language of her en­deavors in graphic arts, she has proceeded to the poetic and dream-like surrealism of painting, in order to achieve α purely personal composition in her tapestries. Works of a mature artist, her creations in tapestry combine, in a breathtaking manner, imme­diacy with expressive power, formal, wholeness and quality. In these creations she defines her material in a new manner and gives us works which can be considered out­standing accomplishments, not only of Greek artistic creation but on an internati­onal scale. Without a doubt we can say they are on the same level as all great art.

b) Catalogue 1990
Excerpts from the text by Giuliano Serafini - Art Historian.

...Voula Massoura worked openly, and once more grasped with a well-known gesture the thread of her own memory and that of all of us - and the semeiolo­gical coincidence stands ουt unavoidably. Το weave, to tie knots, to braid, means to re-enter the great current of historical and, at the same time, transcen­dent being. Α gesture, extremely symbolic alluding to an interior ethnography, in the name of which con­sciousness finds itself again in terms of an absolute, primary moment: that one of the mysterious maternal source.

Is this perhaps a return without a motive? Has the aim disappeared, the function of custom and the previous formulations of the exorcism been forgotten? How can one explain this syndrome surrounding a return to the roots which has dominated, in large part, the recent artistic quests in Europe and of which Massoura proves, reviving archaic technics and the full manual skill?

The passage of each century is the launching point for the question of the mass unconscious and the atavic fears which are bound to the destiny of man­kind. We are dealing with superstition which art interprets through «liturgical» tools, re-inventing its sacred and propitiatory image, replacing the need for metaphysical, the decline of which, according to Hegel, would mean the disappearance of art itself from the human horizon. But it appears that the prophecy has not been fulfilled.

Thus the artist imitates the conjurer without having his power any longer: what he can do, the only thing that is left for him to do, is to remember. That is, to attune himself to the cosmic rhythms, to read in the stars the destiny of humanity, to question them and to receive the same answers, those known to his predecessors. Because «under the heavenly vault ev­erything changes and returns» as Marguerite Yource­nar has written.

...One of the artist's intents - since her unguided progress has permitted her to draw up a program - is to confirm the organic and, Ι would say, biological being of the object, in whatever material class it may belong and to submit it to the estatic confrontation of the eye.

In this way, the vision of the artist becomes our own complementary vision, it helps us to discover a reality, which we have been ignorant of, it reveals to us the miracles of the minimal and the undifferenti­ated. But this perception is not only a visual one: the evocative weight of the material immerses us in the origins, amid the «forgotten memories», ίη the deep unconscious where we again palpably find, between symbol and need, our own archetypal weaving nature, our DNA of fibers.

Equally surprising is how Massoura, from the original stage of choosing her fibers up to the realiza­tion of the work, manages to preserve inviolate the Dionysian behavior of it, its ability to provoke and emotionally move the eye; as if the warp could forever block the dynamics of invention and idea (which here have become sign of the aesthetic language) and recall the fevered moment of quest. This moment is also a (fundamental denial of the surrealistic methodology of the objet trouvé: the recognition, to a degree which is dependent on  alternating sequences of thought, was developed through the instigation of archaic know­ledge and the direct but not fetishistic contact with the material. The density, the weight, the luster, the warmth, the transparency, the reflections of the mate­rial define the creative process and certainly the touch has determinated this choice.

The preference for natural colors is a further proof of her poetic world. The artist works in the void between the natural and the human, between the phenomenon and anthropology, where everything can still be confused and appears under a common creative denominator. Tribal emblems, magnificent outfits of barbarian kings, totems, skins of mythical animals? Massoura's heraldry does not aspire to credibility, nor could it, because it lives by itself an autonomous existence parallel to reality and the myth: here we have the existence of imagination.

Today, the warp and the weft, still continuing to be the basic structure of her work, have become the support of elements which are prominent, and grow­ing ever more complex. Frequently, the substratum contains extensions which go beyond the defined boundaries of conventional aesthetics and are arranged, according a structural plan, into prodigious architectural conceptions.

Certainly this outward pouring of the work under­lines the way out from the mould of art. But it also constitutes a further verification of the transforming and reproductive power that Massoura can give to matter - as a living entity - the extreme development of which is now much nearer to an absolute, plastic idea where the space of art and the space of reality can at last merge.

c) Catalogue 1991, Goethe Institut - Athens
Text by Lena Kokkini - Art Historian

SMALL SHAPES

"We need fewer art crItics
and more snake charmers !"
Ν KALAS

Ι call this exhibition 'Small Shapes' for the simple reason, that Ι am refering to the latest work of Voula Massoura with its simpler forms, more compressed meanings and shapes smaller than in her previous work. Some of these pieces are practically transparent and are transformed by light like the stained glass windows of a Gothic church.

Voula Massoura studied in both Austria and Germany and her principal instructors were two contradictory personalities: Georg Muche and Η. Trökes.
Georg Muche was one of the founders of the Bauhaus movement and one of the few to carry it on after its frenzied persecution by the Nazis (as is well-known the Bauhaus was closed down οn April 11, 1933). He later returned to Germany where he taught painting and weaving at Krefeld until 1960.

Massoura began her student days in 1957, Her 'now' shows how she has compressed the influence of 'then' - in knowledge and in the exercizing of continuous differentiation in the ongoing game of material and free expression along the difficult path of self-discipline. She remembers Muche saying: "Play with your material and make something, nothing is ever lost".
The basic principle of the Bauhaus was the functionality of works of art and consequently the lack of a dividing line between art and life. This position is succinctly stated by the phrase: "there is an art of the act which is equal to the art of life". On the other hand, we have the personality of Trokes and his debates with Joseph Beuys. Through these Voula Massoura came to the conclusion that art cannot be taught; what can be taught is technique, but a good technician is not automatically by eχtension an artist though an artist has to be a good technician. The result was that Voula Massoura addressed ' herself to collage and advertisting posters, wrote a book 'Graphic Arts and Advertising' (1964) while continuing with her painting and sketching. For approximately the last ten years she has been involved with her present work.

My first contact with Massoura's work was in the autumn of 1989. The works in her studio, organic forms, mythical beings, totems, dangling objects, created in me the feeling of some vague threat but which eluded definition. These works, constructed with inspiration and patience, using natural fibers, leather, jute, cotton, hemp, coconut, palm tree bark, polished wood, real silk thread and even horsehair, what Ι would call a 'primer of nature' give rise to the feeling of an unknown world, The book of nature is written with elements foreign to our alphabet and at that moment Ι was unprepared for it.

Some months later when Ι was back in Grϋnewald, the forest which embrace the city of Berlin with its trees, lakes, beloved paths and small, startled squirrels, Ι suddenly remembered Massoura's work. This corrupt child of the city felt a reverse mechanism at work in her as if Massoura's work was the prototype and the forest its reconstruction!..

On my return to Athens, Ι involved myself intermitenltly but gradually ever more intensely with this work, this artist's search for every pattern that awakens the myth of nature.
There is a book by Konrad Wϋnsche (professor at the University of Berlin) called 'Τhe Bauhaus and the Endeavor to put Life in Order", Τhis book overturns the one-sided perception of the Bauhaus School as a school of modern architecture and fine arts which broke away from all traditional bonds. The writer directs his attention to the mystic ideology of the Bauhaus and its endeavor, based on the functionality of art, to put life into a specific order right down to its smallest details.

Ι would come to see this mystical element in the work of Voula Massoura, in her identity with primordial nature from within her own personal endeavor at 'classification'.
Τhe reduction, however, of thirty years of artistic work to just the influences of a single School or studies in Germany would lead both the work of Voula Massoura and my text to an ad absurdum. Massoura affirms the independence of her art, creating her own order, fiχing the boundaries of the primeval, opening new frontiers with the arbitrariness which the need for eχpression and adventure demand.

Ι am not attempting a more detailed description of her works. They are mature and speak for themselves. That is sufficient.
Furthermore, works of art in general cannot be deciphered without encountering resistance. Τhe most precise information constitutes, in the best case, another work in itself!

For a work of art to function as a living presence, a perceptive viewer is also required. Ι do not mean the passive art lover but the viewer who plays the role of a partner, a discourser, who is both the receiver and the transformer. Τhis is, in a sense, an erotic relationship because the viewer both creates and takes risks along with the artist.
Massoura's work calls for such participation.