ariana papademetropoulos

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Ariana Papademetropoulos, self portrait 1996, 2022, oil on canvas, 41 3/8 x 27 3/8 inches, courtesy of vito schnabel gallery, photo argenis apolinario

Ariana Papademetropoulos, nerites, 2023, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, courtesy of galerie thaddaeus ropac, photo flying studios Ariana Papademetropoulos, the organ of magical action, 2024, oil on canvas, 92 x 108 inches, courtesy of galerie thaddaeus ropac, photo charles duprat

interview

by OLIVIER ZAHM

portraits by NADIA LEE COHEN

 

Her hyperrealist paintings revisit mythology and Jungian archetypes as surreal tableaux that serve as portals to fantastical scenes. By blending symbolism with contemporary narratives, she creates illusionistic paintings that challenge perceptions.

For this issue, she was photographed at the turtle conservancy in Ojai, California.

 

OLIVIER ZAHM — The interaction between art and magic has always been there, in a way, since mythological tales — because it starts with poetry and continues right up to the Surrealist movement. How do you explain this connection between art and magic?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — For me, magic is the earliest human attempt to transfer thoughts into psychical reality and to have an influence on the forces of nature. Art, therefore, is a form of magic — the transference of thought onto materials. The first time art was written about in terms of its correlation to magic was by the theosophists. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater wrote a book called Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation.

OLIVIER ZAHM — At the beginning of the 20th century, yes?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — Yes, this was written around 1905. They believed that the nonphysical, hidden realms could only be described through abstract forms. That’s why Kandinsky, who was interested in thought-forms, was the first abstract artist to consider perception to be an impermanent illusion in comparison to its truth — the painted version of reality. Hilma af Klint predated Kandinsky and also imbedded theosophy throughout her spiritual and magical forms. Agnes Pelton, as well. A lot of female artists have always dealt with the spiritual realm. Magic is a universal language everyone can tap into.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Because magical art is a portal to the unknown or to a secret world, to a different vision of the world?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I see art as a shortcut to that. With language, you have to describe something, whereas with painting and art, it’s a visceral, immediate reaction, where you understand something through a feeling rather than through verbal communication. This is very powerful but sometimes undermined.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Where does this interest or attraction to magic come from? Is it because you’re Greek, and all Greek people have a sort of metaphysical or mythological mind? [Laughs]

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I’ve been interested in magic forever, since I was a kid. I always talked to imaginary friends. I played the Ouija board. I was really into witchcraft as a teenager. Also, because of the way I look, being really pale and having dark hair, people always told me I was witchy. So, maybe that visual association made me more drawn to it.

OLIVIER ZAHM — A mutual friend of ours said you went to a kind of magic library in Los Angeles. What is it exactly?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I used to go to magic school in my early 20s. There was a club called Serpentine Society, run by a woman named Maja who gave lectures on magic at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard. They have an amazing occult library. It was started by Manly P. Hall, an incredible character in the 1920s who wrote the book The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which is very similar to theosophy. Theosophy is all about the East and West, about combining all the different religions to find the truth.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is Los Angeles a good playground for this state of mind?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — Los Angeles is one of the only places that allows you to dream. It’s a place where you’re allowed to be delusional and expand your mind. I find that, in Europe, I hear a lot more “no’s.” In Los Angeles, it’s like: “Oh, you have an idea? Great.” It doesn’t matter if the idea is bad or good. And I think LA has allowed people to experiment because it’s a new place. There isn’t a right or wrong way. The Native Americans said that it was the land of smoke and mirrors. There is an energy in LA that allows illusion to become reality. These lines are very blurred in LA.

OLIVIER ZAHM — In Greece, too.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — A hundred percent. And what’s so interesting about The Iliad and The Odyssey is that sometimes when I’m reading, I’m like: “Is it true? Is it not true?” The Trojan War is there. The Spartans are there. The islands and specific locations are real, but the stories are not. So, they entwine mythology with reality in a way you can’t differentiate.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And you’re painting right now in Corfu, a beautiful Greek island. You have the sea, the light, the trees, the rocks. It’s good to paint in nature.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — It’s my favorite. There’s no Internet reception here, either. So, you really get to forget time.

OLIVIER ZAHM — I saw one of your latest paintings, The Organ of Magical Action, at Thaddaeus Ropac, in the show entitled “Re-enchantment,” curated by Oona Doyle. Can you speak about it?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — It was inspired by a chapter of La Flèche, an essay by Maria de Naglowska, a Russian occultist and sex healer who moved to Paris in the 1930s. She was an occultist but also part of the Surrealist movement. She held gatherings that the Surrealists attended, and she was into the idea of the divine feminine, and of transformation and enlightenment through the synergy of the masculine and the feminine. And it’s the same as the duality of light and darkness — and the gathering of opposites. That painting is a nod to The Birth of Venus, yet rather than being born out of the shell, she’s going back into the womb.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Which looks like a big shell, too.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — Apparently, people thought it was vulgar, too erotic. But it’s just a seashell!

OLIVIER ZAHM — In your painting, you’ve developed the technique of having different screens or one picture melting into another. There are different layers, which is part of the idea of magic — that behind the surface, there’s another reality. The two are connected. Sometimes there’s more than one dimension.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — We’re multidimensional beings. The magic is the unseen world all around us. So, there’s this linear field that we’re in and can visualize, but then there’s the nonlinear field, different layers moving around us. And I feel that with my paintings, and I try to combine the layers. It’s the unseen world that you can feel and tap into. Maybe it is not fully visual, but we can still feel it and channel it when necessary.

OLIVIER ZAHM — To come back to Maria de Naglowska, why are you interested in her? She was one of the first to develop the idea that femininity and sexuality can be a way to access a spiritual dimension.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I was at the bookstore Psychic Eye in the Valley, buying some candles, and I just felt very drawn to a book, Initiatic Eroticism, written by her. I had never heard of her before, and I was intrigued by her involvement in sex magic and the Surrealist movement. I have not yet put the book to use, but I am interested in how sex magic is used to manifest and provide gateways to other realms. I like her ideas of masculine and feminine synergy, and on the divine feminine, which I think is prevalent today.

OLIVIER ZAHM — I agree. This different view on sexuality, based not just on reproduction or pleasure but on spiritual exercise, is something that women have pushed forward — more than men, I think.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I think women are naturally more psychic and intuitive. We need to be because every mother has a psychic relationship with her children. If something happens to your kid and you’re across the world, you’ll feel it. It’s our job to be intuitive and clairvoyant and in touch with our emotions. There are men who are intuitive as well, but I think it’s just part of our biology.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It’s also interesting that many magicians of the past, especially in the Middle Ages, were considered witches. And a lot of women were defined or categorized as that.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — When people don’t understand something or don’t know how to categorize something, they become afraid. Magic is not something easy to verbalize, so it’s easy to blame it on Satan, which they think they understand. In the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, the marble statues were carved with such precision and beauty that the sculptor was accused of witchcraft and sorcery. Because the Church couldn’t understand how beautiful something crafted by a human could be, they attributed it to Satan, even if it was a statue of Jesus.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And I read that Maria de Naglowska wrote a few books about Satan to scare and fuck up the minds of the readers — just for fun. [Laughs]

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — She does seem cheeky in a way. She knew the ramifications, and she played with them. Satanism as a religion, at least for Anton LaVey, really is all about being indulgent and liberated — ethical egoism. I believe that with magic, it can go both ways: you can use magic in a positive way, or you can use it in a negative way. And we all do that daily in small ways.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Because magic doesn’t have a hierarchy of values. Everything is mixed. The bad and the good, the material and the spiritual — everything is connected. There’s no big division between reality and spirituality, between the body and the mind. This is why I like what you said about how magic makes us understand that the world has different dimensions, but they’re all interconnected. You also explored this connection between the occult and art in a show two or three years ago, titled “The Emerald Tablet.” Can you speak about it? How did you find the name?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — “The Emerald Tablet” comes from the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. The author of The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, was a theosophist. And Madame Blavatsky, who started theosophy, convinced him to be a writer. So, this idea of the Emerald City, which they travel to, came from the Emerald Tablet, an ancient alchemical text that read: “As above, so below.” So, what you’re talking about is the same — there is no difference between the realms. And that’s what I try to convey in my paintings. They’re about the in-between realm. The magic world is in this world. In my exhibition, I visualized the Emerald City as being the collective unconscious. That’s why there were artists from the last hundred years in the same room, tapping into the same subjects. Mike Kelley was with Agnes Pelton, and Jean-Marie Appriou was next to Leonora Carrington, but they all look like they’re from the same era. To me, all these artists were accessing this dimension. And that dimension goes beyond time and space.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It was very bold of you to do a show about this connection between art and magic because it’s not easy to avoid clichés when you go into magic.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — With the pandemic, this linear way of looking at the world was broken. All of a sudden, we saw that our perfect little cookie-cutter reality could be broken very easily. People now are much more open to magic, tarot, astrology — anything that’s healing. It’s becoming normalized in mass culture in a way that it wasn’t before. I think it’s because we’re entering a stage that’s unknown. And when things are unknown, we look for answers. So, collectively, we’re more interested in the unknown.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is it also because we’re a bit lost and depressed because we don’t really believe in rationality or progress or politics anymore?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I think it’s coming from a survival point of view, in terms of hope. I was having dinner with a priest the other night in Palermo. And his
feeling was that people are becoming more interested in spirituality now — not that they’re becoming religious, but they’re becoming more spiritual and more open. We want answers. Some people get overwhelmed by feeling small in the universe — and some feel comforted. Personally, when I’m by the ocean, I feel small, and I find that very comforting. With the state of the world and the darkness, we can enter either a depressed or a defeated point of view, or we can look for magic and reconnect with our spirituality.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But religion claims to offer an answer. Art and magic don’t offer any answers.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I think art does.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What kind of answer do you propose with your paintings?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — If anything, I want my work to embrace mystery. For me, it’s comforting to know that there are other worlds, that this is not all there is. It’s also looking at chaos or destruction in a different way. There’s something beautiful about looking at a volcano — it’s terrifying and destructive, but it’s also mesmerizing.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you find your subjects? The volcanoes, the melting ice cubes?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — It’s just whatever moves me in that moment. My next show deals with the psychic realm. I’ve been talking to a well-known psychic in LA named Wendy for the past five years. She’s blonde and wears glitter make-up — she’s fabulous. So, half of it is talking about relationships and my career and all that, and for the other half, she visualizes all the paintings I’m going to make. I have the recordings from the past five years of all those paintings. She would sometimes tell me about them, and I would be like, “I don’t know about that.” And then they would brew, and I would start making the paintings she had talked about. So, for this exhibition, I’m only doing specific paintings from her recordings.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, she was anticipating your work, and now she’s part of the process.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — Yes, she’ll go in and see this world she thinks I’m coming from. David Lynch has an interesting way of thinking about coming up with ideas as fishing. So, you’ve got an ocean, and then there’s the fish. Sometimes you catch some, and sometimes you don’t. For me, ideas are always brewing, and sometimes I’m on the verge of visualizing them. And Wendy, my psychic, will grab an idea and fully visualize it. So, in the gallery, there will be a telephone, and you can listen to her recordings.

OLIVIER ZAHM — She lets you record the sessions?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — She always tells me to record them because, a lot of the time, I think what she’s saying doesn’t make sense. But then six months later, I’ll listen to them, and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, it all happened.”

OLIVIER ZAHM — Interesting. So, in a way she’s extracting the subject matter or the scene from you.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — It could be from my mind, but to her, it’s a real place. To her, Ariana’s painting world is an actual dimension, and she just grabs little things from it.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And your mission is to represent it.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — In a way. I’m trying to. As you said, magic is not taken seriously. This process of using Wendy is a way of removing myself from it and thinking about the authorship of the image. It’s not mine; maybe it’s hers, or maybe it’s the purest form of my work.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And do you consider yourself a magician, too, in a way?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I don’t think of myself as a magician, but I’ve been told I’m good at manifesting. I think that just comes from a delusional standpoint of not knowing and not thinking I have to do all the steps to get to a certain thing. In magic, in the same way, it’s through your subconscious. Your subconscious thoughts rule your conscious life. That’s why when we are hypnotized, we have to go into the unconscious so that in our conscious life, we can achieve the things we want. But you can’t do that without fixing your subconscious. And magic is the same thing — it’s just a shortcut. You go into the other world, and it makes life a bit easier.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Because this other world is your own projection. We create our own reality.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — The moment you have positive thoughts, positive things happen. Neuroscientists have studied this, and it’s the neuroplasticity of our brain. So, if we have a negative thought, it’ll manifest itself in reality. That’s why a lot of the time, it’s so important to even lie to yourself and say positive things. If you tell your brain something, you’ll start believing it.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Animals are important, too, in relation to magic. Animals have a soul, don’t you think?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — I do think so. I think we keep them around to connect us to the natural world. I just looked up how old octopuses are. We are like 350,000 years old as a species, and octopuses are 350 million years old. Dolphins are 40 million years old. So, we’re kind of new as a species, and we base everything on language. We think language equates reality. Right now, I’m making a painting of a cat for my show. And I painted lots of unicorns.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do unicorns exist?

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS — It’s a mythological creature, but I think there were probably a few real unicorns in the world.

END