The palette of Maria Spyraki’s series Non-Cognitive Memory Structures (2020–24) belongs to nature as we know it from trees, stones, sky, and earth. The browns, grays, and greens, mixed with gradations of white and black, form an easy pathway into the paintings. They are balanced colors, not loud, and if we imagine the work placed in a landscape, it would probably blend in. Yet we are not looking at actual landscape paintings. The works are earthbound and rooted, but also light, conceptual, and mindful. How do these aspects fit together on the same surface?
Once we shift the attention from color to form and to composition, we cannot immediately identify a clear-cut scene or subject matter. Now the paintings look less familiar. Some circular forms resemble pebbles, or are they bubbles? There might be trees, with fog, but none of this is really confirmed. Associations easily shift. More generally, one could say that organic-looking shapes meet geometric forms. Just as an intuitive way of working meets with a systematic approach to painting. A grid shows up in several of the works and is key to keeping things in place. In painting III the grid is prominent, the main motif, while in painting IV it is almost invisible, hidden in a haze of color. In VII it comes out in dots. The grid cuts the surface into compartments, like a building that has multiple windows, each containing life with differences in style and appearance, yet all made of the same substance. The structure allows for multiplicity within a single painting.
Some shapes seem animal- or humanlike but have not manifested fully as any identifiable creature; in other cases, the shapes look more like plants. We see life when it is still embryonic and fluid, in growth. On the other side of the spectrum, some forms seem to be the result of a process of aging, form losing its substance and appearance. In the center of IX, a mummified figure is floating. Mummies relate to ancient times, pay respect to a valuable past life. Yet the artist does not tell a history about a certain person or place. Rather, she has collected impressions, observations, memories, processing them in the act of painting. She has given all that she has found a home within the structures she has laid out in the paintings.
Some forms are reluctant to identify themselves, others are more explicit. If we reflect on what these paintings are about, it is the process of collecting and accommodating experiences that comes to the fore, rather than the specific forms the experiences take. It is about mapping out layers of memory, offering cross sections of life, yet in an intuitive way. The artist paints from life – not just from observation, but also in a deeper sense, in looking into the dynamics of growth, of birth and death, and of how time defines and changes the appearance and experience of things. This can explain the different layers and compartments in the paintings, each being occupied.
The paintings are like a motherboard containing memories as they are stored and stacked inside of us. It is not about personal memory here, not about specific things that happen in our own lives, but rather about how collective psychology, biology, geology – the whole environment as it has developed, really – leaves an imprint on every human being, defining limits and possibilities. The work is not solely focusing on life’s outward beauty and appearance, but also paying honor to its layered and complex inner reality, things that are inescapable. We see ambivalent forms that could indicate life fading away, or the start of something that is just about to appear.
Between 2022 and 2024 I visited Maria Spyraki several times in her studio in Athens, while she was working on the Non-Cognitive Memory Structures. The text is a result of discussing the series of paintings with the artist. Spyraki was trained as an architect but switched to painting which is now her main practice.