“Writings and Maps”: New Paintings and Ceramic Works by Vasso Triga at the Historical Archive – Museum of Hydra

The Historical Archive – Museum of Hydra presents Vasso Triga’s new solo exhibition titled “Writings and Maps”, opening on Saturday, September 6

The exhibition features 28 new paintings and an equal number of ceramic objects, forming a unified, poetic, and sensorial map of memory, wandering, and internal topography.
As curator Iris Kritikou notes, Vasso Triga combines in her work the gestural density of painterly expression with the contemplative essence of material. Landscapes and figures, organic and geometric forms, shadows, plants, and stones become imprints of the gaze and springboards for conscious emotion. “Her works are stratifications of an inward journey, each one a return to the imagined landscape of an experience with its own material presence,” she characteristically writes.

She continues: “By excavating and inventing the writings and maps of the magical blue island, masterfully shaping this generative thematic cradle – through which she has offered us, in the past, exhilarating visual, aesthetic, and emotional experiences – Vasso Triga paints and crafts with daring skill, matured refinement, and a sensuous tactile force, a hybrid world born of intuition. A world that orchestrates spectral imaginary color charts, translucent or dense blue aquatic beds, untouched deep-green forests with lush foliage, pavilions, scarecrows, and unclassified straw tribes, unexplored deposits that echo the Earth’s core, palimpsests of familiar and unknown symbols, gleaming muds, organic new forms, winged traces, syllabic archetypal scripts, and hues of a pulsating, handmade, handwritten world map.”

The artist herself notes: “My painting leaves traces and engraves marks of a vision that moves between reality and imagination. Each work writes what the eye maps, in order to preserve the sensations that nature evokes in moments of human presence within it.” Hydra, with its rugged geomorphology and strong maritime character, is not just the backdrop of the exhibition but an essential field of dialogue with the work. Its island silence, the spareness of its landscapes, its historical intensity, and its timeless relationship with the sea and the arts are mirrored in Triga’s choices.

As she says: “Hydra is an interior landscape. Not only because of the light and stone, but also due to the layering of time it carries. A place to look inward and listen.” The exhibition functions as an abstract and tactile map. Her paintings and ceramic forms do not simply depict; they are vehicles of memory, desire, and observation – vessels of emotion and everyday cultural heritage. The ceramic object, as the artist writes, “bears the cultural history of everyday life, of the ordinary person who uses it and through it, creates.”

Triga’s work is distinguished by its intense visual and poetic texture, as well as by its distinctive chromatic economy: lapis lazuli blue, white, the textures of stone and plant life define the vocabulary of a painting driven by impulse and memory, where the horizon “dissolves when time demands it.”

Vasso Triga has held fifteen solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad, and has participated in numerous group shows. In addition to painting and printmaking, she is deeply engaged with ceramics, creating a personal, recognizable world of forms that blends the delicate with the solid, the tangible with the intangible, the timeless with the contemporary.

The exhibition “Writings and Maps” is a poetic immersion into the memory of the landscape and the way it is reconstituted through artistic practice – as inscription, as reference, and as a proposition for a more sensitive, more tranquil, more present world.