Maria Joannou
Thirsty

A woman’s hand, sinews tense, her thumb hooked and pulling just so around faded pink undies with a thin, ruffled edge. One tiny bow on its edge whispers of a girlhood almost forgotten (as this is most certainly a woman in the prime of her self-possession). Otherwise, an ocean of skin. She’s pulling those pastel panties halfway down to reveal that tender flesh that folds between thigh and body, suggestive shadow, hardly obscene but the exact right lick of the erotic. Forcefully assured, a slip of the hidden revealed, bold as brass (though her face is beyond the edge of the canvas), but not giving anything up just yet.

The constellation of moles rippling across her body sing like dark stars.

Maria Joannou paints everyday intimacies carved from color, always with a whisper of detachment. Often stripped of easy signifiers these bodies could languidly slide into the iconic, the abstract, some Platonic notion, but the weight and shadow of their curves, the force of their flesh are hardly wisps of pigment. Sharply true without falling headfirst into the hardest glare of photorealism. And though a face or three find their way into view (as does a shirt boldly proclaiming in blocky serif “M A R I A”), these bodies are too singularly real, too distinctively themselves to ever feel anything but individual. You can feel their heft with your eyes, the weight of life in them. These bodies possess the gravitas of soul.

A tattoo’ed circle winks from an ankle. You can almost chip the black nail polish with your eyes. The shimmer of water edging a thigh surfacing from a pool is so wet you can almost taste the chlorine.

Veiled and unfurled, the drape and fold of fabrics don’t look so different from the drape and fold of skin. The passage between flesh and cloth seems hardly a suggestion, something easily slipped off and away. (The women here are often bare and bold, hints of blankets, undies slightly covering, but the men are all clothes, t-shirts and button-ups and cargo pants cut from stone.) A few figures who lounge in bunched and folded fabric, from nudes clutching sheets to the ripple of torn jeans, both gripping and posing in ways that could almost feel a flirt, but the hard wrinkles of even these, and again that carve of color, keep it far from the romanticized even if they are still in all their corporeal sensuality, romantic.

And a gentle absurdity slips in. Nothing dramatically odd, but you feel the play of bodies in real space, a foot pressed against a buttoned shirt, the flipped “R” in a neon AMOUR. Raymond Carver captured something similar in language “Will You Please Be Quiet Please?”

Peering at these paintings, the hard cut of their colors wetly sets one squarely in a paint that never forgot its fluid origins, but look longer and something else winks at you from the pictures. Most everyone has sent a late night nudie, and often for just a peek of deniable anonymity, we keep our faces out of the picture.