Beyond time and place, there is intuition. Breaking up the stereotypes of representation, Eni Koukoula extends her gaze to Vietnam, a country of strong contrasts and suggestive familiarity and offers us a body of work of raw ‘humidity’.
Transgressing the conventions of travel photography, her personal gaze expands to include significant details, cracks of time, shades of emotion, moments of life, ravines of light and geometries of bodies, until gradually, cumulatively and ritualistically the ‘Other’ becomes the familiar ‘we’.
Eni Koukoula’s photographs, committed to deviation and obsessed with the ‘minor’, appear to the spectator with the subtle hues of a modest magnificence. The colours slow down, then re-group and are composed into a new language of conception, beyond mere recording and depiction. These faces, whenever they appear, radiate the reflection of ‘within’.
Eni Koukoula’s ‘Vietnam’, with its intense ‘expressionism’, is a meditation on time. As viewers we see the landscapes and the people of this distant and beautiful land, but as mortal angels we succumb to the recognition of a narration, which in the end becomes a personal affair.
It is the power of art photography to transform the thickness of air, the sense of water, the wet streets, the gutter, the tree clones human traces, life’s relics, hovels and museums, into a certain perpetuity, into a line of light shimmering, a glint of something else, which in the end translates into an affirmation of life, an acceptance of mortality, falsely idealized into immortality.
Nikos Vatopoulos