Rika Krithara
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Ravine II, video installation 2003

video projection, screens
Exhibition | Sketching out Tomorrow and Yesterday, Young Greek artists, Tehnopolis, Gazi, Athens. Curator: Lina Tsikouta-Deimetzis

The words of the artist Richard Long "I use the world as I find it - as a plan and as chance", is also suited the video installations of Rika Krithara.
For the Metsovo exhibition she has created a ravine. With transparent screens with shots of her wandering through the mountains of Epirus, she has recreated the passage through a narrow, claustrophobic ravine.

In her most recent videos, called Deck Log and Tracer, she represented the climbing of a mountain with shots in rapid succession. In Ravine, the arrival at the passage reach the symbolic difficulty of the passing from one world to another.

The ridge-lines of the mountains, the alternation of shapes and density on the horizon, indisputably constitute powerful poetic elements. Shots are delivered in intense, rapid rhythm, with the images flickering, crossing each other, interrupted by pauses, a break up of the flow.
The pause lessen the highly charged atmosphere arising from the intensity of the rapid alternation of clips and rhythms. The rhythms are related to the rhythms of a metronome, but also to the recording of inner rhythms and processes used by the artist in the rendering of the chosen external reality. The rhythm that is dictated to her from within.

Both on a conceptual and an aesthetic level, this is an endeavor to comprehend her limits, both inner and natural. The artist's relationship with the mountain, the rivers, nature in general, the obsession with the mountain in particular, is connected with the enjoyment of being there, her experience of living close to it.

The Mountain could be a symbol of personal tranquility and, at the same time, the conflict arising from the difficulties of living with it. It is an inner exercise and an exposure to its dangers, but also an exposure to the inner conflict within the universal loneliness of nature.

The alteration of the rocks, which crystallize on one plane, as if one mountain were arising from another, is like a universal process of the Ages themselves - the crystallization, the forming of the iron pyrites - a process which flashes through a close-up through the lens of Rika Krithara. The volume of the mountains, their perfect lines, satisfy her aesthetic criteria, nourishing her artistic creativity.

Frequently, the shots of the mountain peak, of the changing lines of the ridges of the mountain, refer to the personal choice to walk along the edge, to experience one's natural and psychological limits.

The Mountain and nature are presented as a summary of poetic revelation. Nature, the nature environment, the passage from the ravine and its conflicts, the violence and the tranquility - inner and outer - subjective and real time, rhythms and focusing, give the impression of revealing the inner pulse of Rika Krithara, who introduces us to the "universal" space of her personal artistic temperament.

Dr Lina Tsikouta-Deimezi, art Ηistorian
Curator, National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum