As I participate in many international forums, I would like to say that I am most impressed with this grand turnout; so many people have come to attend a round-table discussion on the work of an artist! Surely it is not only out of their interest in Opy Zouni's work; they must also love her, and love her a lot. Allow me to add that I love her just as much.
But there is much more to it. What really fascinates me about her work is her non-quietness" - the opposite of certainty - an anti-Herbin, anti-abstract trait, as some of the other speakers said a while ago. But so as not to become involved in the paradox, I intend to clarify my thoughts. This morning I went to view Cycladic art. When you stand and observe a Cycladic statuette, what is it that strikes you the most? At first glance, you think it is the geometry whereas, in fact, it is the opposite of geometry. Conjecture? Profession of faith? I believe that geometry, in the common sense of the word, is an instrument or, I dare say, an alibi, to domesticate savagery. What were the first things to be domesticated? Animals were domesticated from as early as neolithic times and, soon after that, knowledge was to follow; or, I should say, we have been trying to achieve this for thousands of years. In what way? By driving geometry to extremes, we reduce beings' servile dependence on order or, in any case, on a certain will of order, which is regarded as the absolute truth and which ultimately leads to the establishment of a totalitarian order.
Opy Zouni is thus credited with whatever is expressed by the term "terfile perturbation". In effect, perturbation may simply be noise or disorder; it may also be a way of questioning order, the very principle of order, When I consider the ensemble of art, I get the impression that people have invented representation, all forms of representation, as in the case of Byzantine art, as an alibi of an order which the artist submits to but will always transgress.
... What strikes me in Zouni's work is not the geometric distribution which appears to be self-evident, but the fact that it is too self-evident not to constitute a trap. What is interesting is the little perturbation, almost imperceptible, which eludes the trap. On the left, there is a slight fissure. Then again, right in the background of a particular painting, and we have many examples, or on the surface, which could be a plane, there is a play of flowers, or flower petals- so many metaphorical images which generate small swirls in the interior of the composition. It may merely be a matter of eloquence, or then again I could be wrong, but Opy Zouni feels, just like some other artists, that there is a profound change in the computation of what is real.
For a long time we believed that the Universe was perfect, or that it could be perfect, in terms of the potential to develop perfect laws, It is both Newton's illusion and Laplace's determinism. This concept reigned both in the thought ofphysics and in the thought of epistemology; it has also been established in the thought of an. Many people believed in the pre-eminence of a certain geometry. But the true artists, and this must be emphasized, were always transgressing it. The most striking example, and I believe you will not disagree with me, is that of Poussin, who gives the impression of being a classic of geometry, which he is not. In fact he is a "savage", in the same way that Opy Zouni is one, in her own way.
About a century ago, starting with Einstein, a new knowledge began to emerge, a new sensibility for the Universe, which manifested itself with a will for struggle against the totalitarianism of "the perfect". And, in effect, it was from this point, as you alluded a while ago, that technologies have played and continue to play an important role, ever since photography, as you have reminded us, introduced a permanent illusion. Many people believe that by photographing their wife they appropriate her, when, actually, the only thing they own is a piece of paper. You can multiply the motifs or your memories; you can create a disorder in the lines of the person you love or detest; but that makes no difference. After a certain point, when the illusions dissipate, it turns out that the technique has become "the creator", assuming that we are treating it in a way contrary to its common use, almost always in order to maintain our habits, that is to say, our illusions - illusions which have lasted through millions of photographs counted annually in photographic production, all the way to Kodak's disc, which captures them in a magnetic medium.
I think that Opy Zouni feels a certain pan of this "non-quietness". She has been feeling it and taking it into account for many years in a way which grows more and more subtle and she has acquired an autonomy from the geometric "menace", where the Hellenic genius plays, for better or for worse, a dangerous role ... and here you will allow me a parenthesis ... Who was Zeus' first wife? Officially, it is generally accepted that it was Hera. In fact, however, it was Metis, whom Zeus had once swallowed in order to eliminate the risk of being trapped by some form of intelligence which would be different from his own. It is difficult to swallow your wife, even if it is your first wife; this act, however, bears considerable significance in allegoric and metaphoric terms. And I have a feeling that it is a pan of this different intelligence, the existential and not the ontological, that makes the difference which Opy Zouni is in the act of recovering and expressing. This is what creates the impression which I often get when I stand before her large paintings which introduce us to a sort of scenography. We expect something which would resemble the rites of Sophocles, Aeschylus or Euripides, and, yet, there are never heroes; there never is a coryphaeus. Everything takes place behind the scenes, as if the drama has not yet commenced, but is aboutto commence. I sense that what distinguishes Opy Zouni's work is this "non-quietness" which emerges from it and, transcending the traditional supports of painting, tries to transgress the limits of the traditionally- dependent representation of the painting order. Let us not cherish any illusions: painting is in itself the very manifestation of an order. And the proof is that we have been framing paintings for years, and we continue to frame them, a practice which many modern painters have abolished in order to break this code. And I feel that Opy Zouni has within her a form of will which drives her beyond any traditional barriers. An example comes to my mind, here, in this room: when observing her sculptures, one gets a feeling of verticality resulting from a series of alternating small stripes which constantly grow finer and eliminate the monolithic aspect of the sculpture. It seems to me that this "self-denial" is one of the examples which manifest the "fertile" perturbation which I have already spoken about and which I find again and again in Opy Zouni's work. I think that, instead of trying to place the artist according to the traditional context set by the History of Art, it would be more fruitful if we went further, even if this might be overly daring, and accept that behind this very classic appearance lies a "savage" existence. Underneath her Hellenic tunic beats the fiery heart of Dionysus, which makes the rules of established order explode. And this sheds light on another trait which is common in all mythologies: there is no god who espouses a single objective; they are all ambivalent. The entire mythology is complex.
In effect, there is no absolute order, just as there is no absolute chaos. I think that what Opy Zouni is seeking, what is persistently put forward in her work, is the tension between two poles: a tension which is generated the moment the artist moves towards geometry but refuses to be thus confined. She refuses to turn into a prisoner in a geometric prison. Thus she is successful in preserving her freedom by yielding to certain perturbations. She knows, through her artistic intuition, that she reaches the interior of what is called attractor, that strange and particular attractor which in Chaos, just as in the theory with the same name, unfolds in Evolution. This, I think, is the metaphoric impression that this work illustrates, and I am attached to this work no less than I am attached to Opy Zouni and her incessant gestation. Thank you.

René Berger
November 4,1992

The above is excerpted from Rene Berger's introduction, when he was especially invited from Lausanne, to the round-table discussion on "The Geometry of Opy Zouni" which was held at the auditorium of the French institute of Athens in November 1992, on the occasion of Opy Zouni's one-person exhibition.