Sewing, nailing, eating There are works for which we have been preparing ourselves for years, in the same way that life prepares us for death.
As a child and as a teenager, Marilena would see her grandfather, the surgeon, embroidering pillowcases and tablecloths; she would hear her father, the surgeon, nailing up the doors in order to exorcise the evil spirit; she would sit on Persian carpets to eat Jewish sweets that her mother would bring to her from the Jewish school where she would teach eurythmics.
All these three family memories meet in her last work.
Marilena Zamboura, constructing her frames sewed curtains, gauzes and linen, she glued Indian handmade pieces of paper on them, creating a materialistic puzzle, which reflects the cultural puzzle of the three monotheistic religions that concern her.
Zamboura's carpets suffer from the colour disease - where the gold colours of the universe and the red colours of the power undertake to relieve her from a feverish polychromy. With the dancing (often twisted) motions of the angels, the painter indulges the lifelong loneliness of the being that levitates between the celestial and the earthly, the male and the female, the parent and the child, the idea and the object. The nails in her works recall the confines of the paternal figure, the crucified members of Jesus, the suspended evil spell of time.
The Jewish pastry-making (a blend of Spanish, Muslim and Biblical memories of the mouth) is transformed into ottoman decorative art, into Jewish architecture, into Christian iconography. The painter cooks like a surgeon (carefully and in sterility) and then she consumes big quantities of food slowly and concentrated in herself like a Sufi, like a Haggadah like a Stylite.
É believe that this Kaleidoscope of the inside images couldn't find a better receptive place than the Yeni Mosque, since in the building of Pozeli the Byzantine cross, the Crescent and David's star had been flowing like refreshing water for years.
As for the "Angel" (Zamboura's "Carpet dealer") he doesn't violate the sanctity of the place (where in former time the islamized Jews and the Muslims would kneel to talk to God He is just displaying his wares; that is the colours, the patterns, the textures, the wears and the burls of the most difficult and ancient art - that of co-existence.