Most important in Opy Zouni's work is the double cultural heritage that lies behind her personality: her combined Egyptian and Greek background. Geometry is no doubt the most direct link between the artist's sensibility and her environment. Whether she is making paintings, sculp tures or environmental installations, Opy Zouni always comes up with "atmo spheric works": visual propositions that are both statements of intention and mapped-out routes. Everything is relative.
As opposed to Egypt, Greece prefigures the values of the West - with an organic link joining both ancient cultures together: the link of light, which is indeed the same in Cairo, Alexandria, Athens and Sparta. The artist translates and transposes light into clearness. The clearness of colours, that is limited to elementary contrasts; the clearness of perspectives, the purity of the mental and sentimental space that emanates from each work. A clearness which, because of the rigorous absence of figurative and human references, may seem cold at first - although this is but the rational effect of a certain mental naturalism. Opy Zouni proposes conceptual landscapes. This involves a true sense of nature that deliberately eliminates detail in order to delve into the very head ofthe matter. Opy Zouni's artistic being contemplates. When this contemplation is projected onto the aesthetic domain of forms and volumes, it is expressed through cognitive devices. These devices are simple in so far as bare logic spontaneously identifies with the scope of both the elementary and the essential.
Opy Zouni's compositions function perfectly, from a rational point of view, thanks to their simplicity and clearness. Their rigour by no means excludes a certain sensual attachment to light, although light, too, is in fact a mental concept: its intervention cannot but pass through the filter of reason.
This rational, systematic mechanism can be compared to a certain joie de vivre on which temperance has left its mark.
Opy Zouni's geometry is indeed that of a functional balance that draws its efficiency from its own clearness and moderation. This approach of ad, inspired by moderation, triggers an allusive yet insistent visual alarm. Opy Zouni's empty spaces gradually lose their apparent coldness and the space within the structures in perspective slowly fills up with the psychological flux of anticipation. This dimension of anticipation is like a reflex activated by the architectural impact of the composition. Something is bound to happen, eventually, in these corridors, these rooms, these openings onto our boundless visual parallaxes.
Something will indeed happen. And that is exactly what we are anticipating. Until we gradually begin to realize that no surprise or dynamic shock is lying in store. No violence appears on the Zounian horizon. The only thing that does appear is a furtive, surreptitious translucent veil of serenity.
Opy Zouni's geometric void is constructed around calmness. Its moderation also visualizes hope. Clear conceptual shapes correspond to ontological definitions. Everything has been said, it seems, so we perform a structural tautology - our second glance being just as clear as the first. This oeuvre, this one and only mystery, this calmness and voluptuous pleasure of being is looked at without mental reservation.
Endless sensibility and a good deal of common sense are needed to join the subtle and the geometric spirit into what might, eventually, become a hymn to the joy of living. Mondrian's rigour, is reviewed and corrected with Matisse's light.

Pierre Restany
Paris, December 1985