What People Are Saying About Magoni

Despo Magoni’s Humanistic Expressions

“The secret of Magoni's portraits is that they are portraits of the inner faces of the powerful. She has shown us the portrait that Dorian Gray kept hidden in the attic.

News photographs are transformed into powerful expressionistic images. Her visionary portraits are harsh, but also emphatic-enraged, yet also strangely sublime, for the figures are like prickly cacti in the desert of history, holding their own and offering some human nourishment even as they reflect its inhumanity.”

DONALD KUSPIT
New York, 1999

Prometheus Unbound;
Pandora Unleashed: The Human Condition

“By both trafficking in gendered typologies and transcending them, Magoni establishes her own mythos - one both familiar and subversive. In her universe hope cannot dispel suffering but somehow the human struggle is not without hope. It is largely from this paradox, clothed in varying characters and narratives, that Magoni's work draws its strength.”

THALIA VRACHOPOULOS
New York, 1999

Myth and Memory

”Moving from one body of work to another, Magoni presents us with a disconcerting shift of scale. The diaristic quality of The Book of the Dead Dad immerses us in minutia of life, bringing back her father by reconstructing a series of fleeting moments and emotions. The Thousand and One Nights hurls us to the other end of experience. It brings us in touch with a vast, unthinking nature that is unaware of our existence. The shift is at once exhilarating and unsettling.”

ELEANOR HEARTNEY
New York, 1997

Old Game New Rules: Despo Magoni’s The Queen’s Moves In A Game Of Chess

“Like the old masters, Despo Magoni uses painting to tell a story but there is an unexpected element in her work, a turn in the story she tells, that ushers us into a world very different from the one that art history has made familiar. By a single maneuver, at once elementary and complex, Magoni has turned art history on its head. In this suite of twenty-three paintings titled The Queen's Moves in a Game of Chess, Magoni has broken with a thousand precedents by the simple act of making her protagonist a mature woman.”

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN
New York, 1994

Figures, Forms and Personal Myths

“The female figure is of pivotal importance in Magoni's recent work and seems to embody, in the manner in which it is presented, the heroin of a myth or, rather, a sequence of evolving myths. These stories encapsulating memories and associations handed down through many generations seem to propel the continuing development of Magoni's artistic capabilities.”

DORA ILIOPOULOU-ROGAN
Athens, 1989

To Survive A Myth

“Important as both pathos and ethos are to Magoni's paintings, it is self-knowledge which is most recognizable as the central myth in all her work. Rage, after all, is a consequence of knowing injustice; pathos, of knowing what is lost or causes pain.

G. ROGER DENSON
New York, 1988

On Pathos

“Despo Magoni's recent paintings of single figures ( or, occasionally, pairs of figures ) are variations on a single theme - more accurately, on two themes that have become so interwined as to be indivisible: pathos, suffering, and the relationship between men and women. Magoni can be usefully be compared to artists like Francis Bacon and Leon Golub, who connect with a painterly tradition of expressionist figuration and who use that tradition as a tool for a speculative interrogation on the figure's expressive capacity.”

BARRY SCHWABSKY
New York, 1986

Despo Magoni

“Magoni gives us no answers - indeed she implies that there are no simple answers. The web we have constructed to define our world and maintain control over our lives has become intolerably complex. It brakes down when we least expect it and relentlessly entwines us in our own folly.”

ROBERT BROWNING
New York, 1986

Echoes From The Past Are Always Present

“Magoni paints to witness history, to articulate and dramatize the victims and survivors, and to purify the viewer and herself. Her art reflects a world wounded and in pain.”

DAVID COLE, 1981