Rea Papadopoulou - Dark Tree

Rea Papadopoulou in the Dark Tree series explores the area of Eleonas at night, with a sharpened architectural look, sensing the suggestive dim lights of the municipal lighting and the perimeter security floodlights, which create unexpected foci of attention and abysmal gaps.The dim lighting and the film of dust that spreads everywhere paint almost everything in earthy tones: unguarded yards, Doric buildings, deserted outposts. Almost every photo contains wild flora (often evergreens, trees-weeds of disturbed soils according to the photographer), bushes, clusters of trees that cast shadows on fences and yaps or crown the image with their branches, along with the halo of the city.Sometimes the flora rages, claiming vital space where human activity recedes, proposing subtle curvature versus anthropogenic rigid straightness. Imitations of ancient statues, stacks of materials, conduits and streams –over which adventurous branches float– emerge from the shadow light. Papadopoulou highlights enigmatic as well as complex landscapes, carefree and anarchic, the fluid geometries of which recall a desolate film scene, in a hiding place of the historical with the modern, the functional with the abandoned, the natural with the constructed.And she listens to Eleonas as it oscillates awkwardly between an ancient olive grove and a post-industrial garbage dump, the target of fancy commercial redevelopment plans and a magical place whose multifaceted stories are told at night by the rustling of leaves,and are stored by the sturdy stature of every dark tree.
-Hercules Papaioannou