“My Dear A….” at Artshot Gallery: Anastasia Dedonaki unfolds her drawings and paintings like scattered pages in her first solo exhibition

Anastasia Dedonaki presents her first solo exhibition, “My Dear A….”, at Artshot Gallery.

As noted by archaeologist and art historian Iris Kritikou:
“In her first solo exhibition, bearing the suggestive title ‘My Dear A….’, Anastasia Dedonaki unfolds her drawings and paintings like scattered pages, in the effusive manner of an evolving urban diary. She composes a painterly, intimate path that is delicately woven and gradually revealed to us, preserving an imagined body of letters addressed always to the same recipient-unknown to us, yet familiar to her.

Equipped with small watercolor sketchbooks, the artist moves through the city, sometimes on foot and sometimes by bus, pausing wherever her gaze encounters a subtle trace that somehow concerns her-a point of suspension from which small events hover and unspoken stories silently beckon, ready to unfold. At times seated in a café, at others on a bench, or walking slowly through urban groves or toward the edge of the sea on an island, excavating the innermost layers and delicate seams of a place, she captures confessional, note-like drawings—clusters of images seeking connection and narration.

Later, in the studio, many of these initial on-site sketches are enlarged onto canvas. Embracing difficulty, the artist mimics the sensation of glaze by mixing white into her colors, thus achieving, through oil, a luminous lightness reminiscent of watercolor, while simultaneously softening the boundaries of the original drawing.

In her works, cool tones exist in careful balance with warm ones, developing a distinctive painterly ‘software’ of the brush. Purples and blues, oranges and greens that traverse the canvas and define its atmosphere, enter into a secret dialogue with beloved museum works or with invisible reservoirs of condensed personal memory. Each day is tinted with a different color, while each work-constructed like a collage of heterogeneous notes-acquires its own distinct purpose.

At the same time, the monochromatic surface is interrupted or complemented by a differently colored inserted figure, rendered with meticulous attention: the same familiar boy appears in sequence and at different ages within the same canvas, alongside his friends-girls and female figures who sometimes belong to the artist’s close personal circle and at other times derive from the treasured photographic childhood worlds of Shirley Baker or the recognizable, sharp black-and-white presences of Cartier-Bresson.

Altogether, this spectral, secret garden of Dedonaki intriguingly penetrates the continuous noise of the city, defining a soothing silence. It calls upon the viewer to process these images internally, to engage in associative thoughts akin to those of the artist-guiding the gaze with certainty from unthinking looking to true seeing.”