Whirlpools

Eva Divari has been engaged in painting for many years, and has been showing great colour sensitivity and matching draughtsmanship. Her interest is focused mainly on fluid situations, such as images that convey living memories, with a nostalgic or reminiscent mood. The environment and the human adventure often attract the artist's attention, who renders confrontations or their symbolic associations through a spectrum of constant change.

The forces and the swirling motion of a whirlpool are, in most cases, motifs that evolve and recur regularly in her works in order to indicate the motion of time, of constant change and of precarious balance, out of which life emerges or disappears to be reborn with boldness, persistence, realism and, at the same time, imagination vis-a-vis the agnosticism of chaos.

The works of Eva Divari are inspired by the world of the sea, from which she draws most of her experiences.

Her subject matter, however, is not exhausted in the impressions she has gathered from her travels. In her paintings, these travels have been transformed into voyages of the mind or the imagination, which contain the existentialist angst in the face of the random and the unexpected; into the yearning and the expectation of surmounting obstacles, felt by the individual who possesses the will to overshoot the solitary self and unite with the universal laws of a metaphysical reality.

Eva Divari's series 'Whirlpools' began to formulate gradually in. the previous parts of her work, when the realistically depicted elements (such as the moving human forms, the skateboarders or the sailing ships) were linked to a revolving space, which in turn was a reference  to light itself and the analysis of its gradations of colour. The realistic forms were juxtaposed within an expressionistic space, which used reduction to transfer the inner workings of a visionary dramaturgy shining through the viewing surface.

In the next part of Eva Divari's work, the surface and the depth became the reflection and the mirror of a juxtaposed -though, in substance, uniform- reality.

In her paintings, the movement of the clouds in the sky is identified with the undulation of the sea. The changes in moods, climate, season and psychodynamic characteristics eventually lead to a kind of tunnel which absorbs, transforms and constantly emits or attracts light and life like a beginning of the creation of all things, a kind of iconistic construct to whose commands and laws all the epiphenomena are subjected. Space is subdivided cubistically, analysed and reconstructed. The surfers' bodies are precariously balanced on a circular orbit.
They face the raging winds and the huge waves which appear, sometimes transparent and at other times foaming, challenging, to block or absorb or sometimes to reform the bold and fateful clash with motion and flight in this journey of height and depth that knows no bounds.

In the past, the tree trunks and branches resisted the force of the wind, while Eva Divari's painting idiom wavered between the realism of detail and the reductivism of the dynamic forms that expressed her ideas. Both the solitary sails and the tree trunks exemplified, in a way, the unruly elements of a changeable nature or of the human will to resist the laws of gravity as well as those of static’s. In her series 'Seagulls' they begin to present, in a clearer way, the balance between the theme, the symbols, the ideas and the artistic negotiation of the composition. The seagulls, each one with its distinct momentum and direction, add meaning to the visionary landscapes of Eva Divari.

Space itself, especially in the recent group of the artist's works with seagulls as its theme, is arranged on the basis of optical perceptions and references to flying. Geometrical formations consisting of four-sided figures, where each shape is linked to and merges into the next at different levels, create the frame of the colour spectrum that derives its dynamic origin from the 'whirlpools'. Parts of a whirlpool reveal the meaning of space and of the framework from which the seagulls emerge to guide the viewer's gaze to the depth of a truth existing under phenomenology and is elusive like flight itself.

What the painter truly wishes to express, is the enthusiasm of the independent being that constantly seeks behind the phenomena to find the sources of life, of light and of time through an ever-lasting adventurous quest. This is an insightful reality that Eva Divari keeps insinuating at and searching for although she is aware of its elusive substance.