Shadow people are refined in the morning colors by the railway tracks. Travelers with old – age luggage arrive at the undisturbed uniformity of the central European city with the colorful buildings, the small windows and the attics. A yellow giraffe dominates over the turquoise leafage blossoming on the red ground from which children pop up as if they had sprouted up. A child is riding it. He is depicted somber and frowned as if he is coming from Classical Athens and the Severe Style in a trip – reliance over time.

Yellowish intersecting sky – scrapers rise obstructing the blue horizon, next to light blue apartment blocks with orange red windows. Their designated space is turned into a huge amusement park with double or single seats for passengers, tied to an invisible wheel and swinging like they are travelling through time and space. Night travelers with soaking wet clothes and children in their arms come out to land and head towards the luminous city which emerges in the background of the painting. A lonely passenger walks on a glossy platform of a mysterious subway surrounded by ghost – figures which create a peculiar frieze both on the wall and the arcade.

A melancholic crowd in shades of blue spreads in a pyramid – like layout, moving in a unified and closely united mass towards the high buildings of the deep red city with the multicolored windows. Male and female bodies are geometrically analyzed in timeless spaces of cubistic style and expressionistic passion. A lonely female figure, in an enclosed garden with high trees where the water element prevails, is gazing at the skyline with the companionship of a purple drink in a cocktail glass. For once more time is indefinite, a moment or an eternity.

Blue travelers with shabby suitcases are reflected in the water behind pointed railings, looking towards the city behind the yellow forest. Three suitcases, of which one is deserted, and two travelers, one adult and a child, are waiting to board the mysterious train from which ghostly figures are looking at them. People – dummies are climbing stairs. People, at all times without faces, swarm into a coffee shop like bees swarm in a beehive. Everything is a journey, a transition.

All the above and many more constitute the world of Maria Giannikou in her new series of paintings inspired both from the journey as a transition and the notion of the traveler as a seeker, a beseecher or a refugee for many reasons and in many forms. For this reason the transition cities take a symbolic form. These cities are not Ithacas but Arcadias, pictorial paradises which constantly belie and fade away. At times they are transformed… And, very rarely the trip gets auspicious. It’s frequently liberating and passionate but never auspicious…

Red, black, light blue and yellow dominate the whole series of Maria Giannikou’s work, setting a timeless coefficient in her work. And a personal maniera having deep roots in German expressionism, thematically on “Die Brücke (the Bridge)”, chromatically on “Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)”, simultaneously approaching within a personal interpretation and experiential assimilation the melancholy of the pre – cubistic Blue Period of Picasso.

The works of Maria Giannikou simultaneously bring out traces of the zeitgeist of our time. How familiar do those wet figures seem with their babies, suitcases, the ubiquitous element of water, the fences – borders as the point of intersection between the journey to the open horizon and the indefinite vague transition? The destination is not as important as the journey, as the flight itself. This ironically verifies all the theories about “nomadism” that the cultural theory of the 20th century foretold for the 21st. Maria Giannikou as an artist is without any doubt a citizen of the world but essentially and contextually a citizen of Mytilene, a place which today acquires symbolic dimensions every notion of transition.

Moreover, the works of Maria Giannikou can be interpreted in many personal ways as all the iconographic elements that compose them gain potential symbolisms on many levels. Therefore, the concept of the journey may gain the notion of a personal route and transition, or otherwise a travel to experience, life, choice, decision. Or, the route to artistic development and the ideological quest of the artist in a world which is constantly transforming into hyper-technological Middle Ages. In this sense, the work of Maria Giannikou sends out a deep humanitarian message: “We are all travelers in space and time, let’s understand one another in this course”. The notion of transition acquires transcendent dimensions in this way and identifies with the notion of the human being.