From 1997 "DECAY - REMINISCENCES"

a) Catalogue 2000,
text by Voula Tsouna - Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Barbara.

   
Artist personal technique / Decay - Reminiscences

I first saw Voula Massouras' work in her own atelier, against the background of artcrafts belonging to earlier periods of her activity. I am somewhat familiar with the rhythms and patterns that emerge as she moves from one phase of creativity to the next, and one thing I have always found admirable and rare about her work is the fact that it preserves its coherence and continuity throughout its many different stages. Her sources of inspiration change, as do her artistic techniques and the materials of her craft. Nonetheless, one can tell that these shifts are never random, but represent carefully designed steps towards the fulfillment of goals set by Massouras' vision.

This unity of inspiration and thought is carried over to her new series of works, which constitute the collection 'Decay - Reminiscences'. And yet there is here something strikingly different from anything that the artist has achieved ever before, namely a sense that these works of art stretch far back into the past, that they are new as well as very old and their beauty is that of ancient ruins. The surface of some of these pieces looks like parchment turned yellow with the passage of time. Others ressemble papyri sheets long preserved somewhere deep in the sand. Yet others are darker, brown, grey or almost black, evoking ancient papyri carbonised during the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius almost two millenia ago.

The association of these canvases with buried manuscripts is not accidental. For they have undergone a process comparable to the natural decay of the records of human civilisation. When the artist begins to work on each canvas, it is no more new and white and clean. Its surface has been altered with paints, acrylic wax and other materials depending on the theme of the work, before being buried into the earth. There the process of decay begins. The artist has wanted it to begin and watches over it zealously for several weeks. She wets the earth, the canvas ages. She unearths it, inferferes again with the various materials and puts it back in. Then, at some point, the canvas is ready: stains and wrinkles and cracks mar its surface, in some places it is torn, in others the cloth is gone and strange  shapes emerge as one looks at it. It has now a story to tell, the story of its own reminiscences, much in the way of old documents scorched by the heat of the sand or carbonised by the lava of the volcano.

Ancient papyri carry memories only because they have survived, but they have survived only at the price of their own decay. Whole layers of scrolls are missing, destroyed by time or by our efforts to unroll them. To reach the heart of the papyri burnt by Vesuvius and add their contents to the store of human memories, we have sliced them and peeled them off layer by layer. Pieces turned into ashes in our hands, while parts of them lay open, fragmented and fragile, to our curiosity. Their characters, in capitals or in cursive, are neatly set next to one another forming lines and columns of text, yet we cannot read them all. Some letters are mutilated and all that is left of them are dark traces of ink or of soot. Others are completely gone and we can only guess what they were from the lacunas left in their place. It is as if their authors, long dead and often anonymous, ask us to rescue them from oblivion, to reconstruct the texts that time, fire, water and the human hand have taken apart in centuries past.

This is what Massouras' works ask us to do as well. Our imagination and sensitivity are summoned to retrieve memories hidden behind the slits and shadows of the canvases, to reinterpret the signs and shapes and characters inscribed on them. Through the corrupted cloth, we discern checked patterns of squares, irregular shapes sometimes resembling prehistoric animals, black patches edged with shreds, cracks  showing the pressure under the surface, dark brown areas that look like scorched earth or burnt wood, traces of writing belonging to undeciphered laguages of people long dead. Pictures of decay, these works activate a kind of memory which is not confined to individuals. It is perhaps a primordial memory, a memory of the cells, urging us to open an ongoing dialogue with ourselves and with our collective past.

b) Catalogue 2003,
text by Marilena Karra - Art Historian.

But the abyss is also made itself of sails
Where live and spring out of my eyes thousand 
Creatures that are for the familiar seeing lost
                                                Charles Beaudelaire

Voula Massoura buries underneath the ground brand new pieces of cloth-canvasses-after she has sprinkled them beforehand with coloring material in powder and moistened them, like the ground that is going to cover them, with water. This earthly surrounding will effect the life of the fibers, by producing to them initially unspecified, at least to a certain degree, alterations and wears, but on the same time contributing to their enrichment from the experiences caused by their burial of a, more or less, determined duration.  Yet, these cloths are not altogether immaculate, since before their burial they were submitted to a certain preparation, an initial synthetic elaboration on a pattern and water-soluble colors, and they are not abandoned in an innocent and unconditioned way to the proceedings within the ground, because the artist herself has already took care in separating somehow (i.e. using wax) some of the surfaces, in order to avoid an absolute uniformity. Therefore, in this case, everything seems to be a game between the concrete and the indefinite, between the voluntary and the random, the artistic volition and the timing or the coincidence, the premeditated and the spontaneous, the "poetic" technique and the poetry of the result, between the reasonable action of the chemical combination and the untamed nature's fantasy. These contrasted terms describe the polarity that characterizes the works of V.M, and which, on one hand, lies upon the conscious and structured artistic act, and on the other hand, on the entire surrendering to the fortuitous, out of which, the fact that it is voluntary, does not deny the unforeseen and the surprise. V.M. seemingly intends to construct monuments, to provoke the activation of a not at all aphoristic memory, by creating the necessary  conditions for her works to be testimonies and traces of a history, that does not consist their exclusive history for sure. "The grave is the confidant of my infinite dream/ (For is the grave that always the poet understands)", notes Charles Beaudelaire in his Flower of the Evil.

The process here used, lies on the antipodes of the process that was used in course of the contemporary history of the Arts by artists, of the like of Alberto Burri's, for instance. In this occasion the clothes were already old, worn, torn sacks, and already wretched, misused, reduced to rags by the use and time, cloths, being vehicles of their own, personal history, that remains unknown, and maybe indifferent, to us. There, memory and traces were originally existed, consisted the testimonies of an experienced past that wore out and degraded those cloths, that are elevated and ennobled through the artistic gesture, so as to become a monument of the sufferings afflicted to the matter, in another time. Therefore, the matter is promoted as the absolute sovereign of the work of art, passes from its lowest to the highest degree, for it becomes space, and its wounds end as points of reference, recognition marks of orientation to this very space,

On the contrary, in V.M's works, the afflictions on the matter are imposed by the artist herself, in the context of a definite, voluntary process, where time is not a conventional or inevitable factor, but holds a part offered by the artist herself, a part that is nothing less than the one of the co-creator. Here, the origin and the condition of the wear are known, and by no means indifferent, given that consist a part of the artistic performance, which oscillates between of the controlled and at the same time uncontrolled terms of a conscious game with the matter and time. Here, the wears, to which the matter is intentionally submitted, have nothing to do with melodrama, heroism, violence, symbolism or didacticism, on the ground to the nature:  "Produces but does not appropriate/ acts without expecting anything/ and when its work is done, does not attach to it/ and since is not bound to it/ its work should live", if we could use the words from Tao. Mostly, is about the serene, unforced, creative influence of the time and nature on things, that enables them to interiorize, and afterwards to draw up and set off the absolutely basic. In this case, this absolutely basic is the essence and the truth of the matter, that appears completely flat, deprived of the slightest assumption of depth, and follows a course of meditation, since the canvass could not be hide, neither neutralized for the benefit of the subject, that is about to be represented on it, but consists the very essence and the subject of the work.

So, even here the protagonist is the reality of the substance, that is to say its texture, its resistance, its sensibilities, its reactions, its defenses to some points, its absolute surrender to the ware on some others. All these are materialized, that means they are formed through what is provoked by the sufferance, via these splits, the scratches, the scrapings, and every other form of rupture of the continuity on the surface of the cloth, rendering sensitive and vulnerable the already, partially, conquered canvass. Thus, the conventionally considered support of the work, which is bound to receive the subtle pictorial, but as well of every other kind (by other materials, as varnishes, or glues), interventions from the part of the artist, is in need of another support which is found on big surfaces of plywood, that are covered with many layers of tar-paper, in order to point out and make more explicit, more intelligible,  the sufferings of the matter, its wounds and scars. And this is happening because the created gap are alike phonemes that articulate a disorderly, but at the same time spontaneous and unaffected language, a speech consisted merely by exclamations, exclamations of sorrow, of stoicism, of anger, of objection, of surprise, and, why not, of hilarity, in front of all that is happening under the ground, all that fermentation that takes place during the burial. The sometimes thin, dim, subtle, and sometimes more stentorian, "screams" are so loudly conceived by our visual perception, that we think we can hear them. The ripped canvass  turns into a moving, ethereal, as if it were transparent, yet solid structured, space, where something happens. And what is happening is an event, many casual coincidences, numerous surprises, an action, an issue. It is a space that breaths and palpitates, and where is going on the plot of a drama (we use that word with no intention to charge it with a signification whatsoever), consisted of exclamations, screams, sighs, and breathings, representing insinuatingly, and with an airy grace, the sound of its sensorial experience. Because the matter, in spite of what she had to bear, in no way had lost the senses. On the contrary, it focused them to what it was happening to it, and let them cherish this experience with all their strength and sensibility. And right on the parts where the canvass is wrinkled, it seems that it shivers at the remembrance of the sufferings, while where it stands stiff and supercilious, is like confirming its outmost resistance to the wear, or ignoring the sufferings that had been subject to. Anyway, it's the memory and the senses that bread the creative impulse, according to Arthur Rimbaud.

However, despite the time-consuming preparatory proceeding that was needed on the creation of these works, in the final result Voula Massoura manages to give a sensation of  works made by Chinese, or Japanese painters, who must achieve the drawing of a line, or a shape in one movement, with no possibility for corrections at all, due to the fragility of the paper or the silk. Thus, when she intervenes with her mediums on this fragile surface of the lacerated cloth, that looks like a thin skin full of scratches, even when she increases or reduces the amplitude, or the intensity, of these wounds, se seems that she's operating alla prima, that is to say on the first try, proving that the delicacy, which by no means consist an ethical, or cultural principle, is an urge, a demand, that in this case seems to be satisfied to the very end. There are works that seem to be overexcited, possessive, dogmatic, vindicating, which they impose the product, and attribute to it the tyranny of an imposed idea, or a forced meaning. The works of V.M. they want to conquest nothing and none, they oscillate between the desire, that has animated with discretion the hand, and the nobleness. Like those big rooms in South France, that mentions Paul Valery, which are appropriate for meditation, into which only the spirit desires to inhabit.