Each era has its own form of terrorism. In the sphere of contemporary art, terrorism takes the form of the arbitrary division between the avant garde and traditional expression. Such a division makes permissible - and theoretically legitimate - all conceivable acts of stupidity, and really does stand things on their heads. On the other hand, true artists maintain a dignified (and sometimes disgusted) silence; it is as if their revulsion is their only possible defence.
Lila Papoula strives to speak in images, while at the same time calling into question the imposition of the flowing electronic images which are predominant nowadays. She chose painting partly because it is a mater lingua and an imago imagines and partly because it combines meditation and concentration with explosive references to emotion. It is the duty of painting today to serve as aesthetic resistance; otherwise, it has no raison deter. That is what this artist achieves, quietly and without resorting to facile impressions. The research which Lila Papoula has carried out constitutes a unique balance between the manifest and non-apparent, between the trivial and the precious, and, lastly, between the minimal and the monumental whose form it can assume. This painter has things to confess; at the same time, however, she wishes to delete from her iconography any suspicion of rhetoric or pomposity. The given function of the canvas is frequently subverted so as to create projections and developments which allow superimpositions on the surface and the generation of unequal outlines. In this manner, the painting succeeds in projecting itself into space in a manner which is partly physical. It could be said that in these plastic and constructional solutions the sovereignty of the image is intensified like that of a relief, and the painting lays claim to space ex officio.
In their successive layers of script, Lila Papoula’s paintings become a palimpsest containing a multitude of information and approaches, with allusions to stories which may begin there but end in the mind of the viewer. In some works, a smaller painting has become entrapped on a larger surface, like a memory set on an icon-stand or a buoy afloat in the sea. The translucent glacis leave such traces of tenderness that the image can be concealed or revealed as the requirements of memory dictate. Lila Papoula’s themes are, ultimately, her memories. In parallel, the symbols which perform the narrative are present not so much for their symbolic value as for their emotional connection with the artist herself. In other words, an infinite number of shades of meaning (or expediences) have interpolated themselves between the idea of a house and its depiction in visual terms. Above all, however, the artist’s will has imposed itself, so that the representation of a house speaks not of the world of the image but solely of the world of the artist.
The feature which, ultimately, predominates in the work of Lila Papoula is her desire for personal confession and her tendency to condense in a manner suggestive of the adoration of icons the components of an ideal reality - a reality which is sometimes of the past and sometimes of the future, but never of the present.
Indeed, this could be said to be a feature of painting in general. If by resisting it can survive the barrage of images which seek to level it, it will be its duty to hover - to hover between the past and the future, between the familiar and that which is unfamiliar but nonetheless exists…

4.1.95
Manos Stephanidis
Art historian, curator of the National Gallery.