Studied graphic Arts at Vacalo School, Athens, Greece. Attended classes of Freehand Sketching - Colour at the same school under the teaching of P. Tetses. Studied painting at the atelier of Antonis Apergis.

It is usually assumed that what artists do with the artistic means at their disposal is to present us a part of reality. To be accurate, however, it should be pointed out that what we are presented with is not a rendering of reality but what artists consider as an equivalent of reality since they have the ability to pick up elements and transform their images, to reshape enrich and confer meaning to the expressive particularities of their own visual realities, alerting the eye to the variety of versions and levels of outlook.

The painter's experiences, memories, references and "translated" associations awaken the senses by creating associations between the "objectivity" of the elusive and the "subjectivity" of the painter's intentions, beliefs and priorities. By confiding his/her quests now emerging through surfaces then coming up from the depths of the work's significance the artist reveals different aspects of reality. Once completed, the work develops an independent, communicative language based on the communicability of the provoked stimuli as to the viewer's response.

Mrs. Cleopatra Varveropoulou realized these processes already from the beginning of her artistic development, therefore she chose her particular subjects in order to present the dramaturgical co-existence of oppositions via the analysis and abstract reorganization of their structures. Typically, in her works she begins with observing and depicting a conventional everyday scene, An interior scene with two seated figures that might well have gone unnoticed to the sensationalistic gaze. The figures are alive and at the same time exist as if in absence having left the displacement of their being at their place which activates the significance of light and space.

The painter does away with unnecessary descriptions and trifling details. She focuses on the bargaining and balancing of colour volumes. Light does not irradiate with reality but secures the likelihood of the observed. Mrs. Cleopatra Varveropoulou uses it as a means to investigate the unrevealed truth in the name of which she penetrates its constituents.

The nature she is concerned with is not the nature of things. Without a total denial of its outer aspects, she seeks to highlight the mechanisms of a wider determinacy behind phenomenology. A determinacy arising out of the microcosm to insinuate the larger scales of the, for the most part invisible, world which we assume or suspect to be functioning by means of regulatory factors of conflict and harmonization, mixing and transformation, metamorphosis and reduction of matter to energy, imprints turning to fossils, fluctuations of intensity turning to property, formation turning to situation through the gesture of scripture, a shifting and elusive "landscape". A "landscape" whose open horizons can be traced by transcendental reflection and sensitive insight.

And yet Mrs. Cleopatra Varveropoulou does not express any idealized fixations in her works. Her abstract process does not end in generalizing semantic simplifications neither in romantic vision, of course. In her landscapes of structures and interference, the adventures of matter prolong the expressionistic action of gesture revealing birth, intercourse, the transformability and wasting of the earthly. This is why time is not ostracized in her works. On the contrary. it suggests itself in the catalytic processes it brings to bear upon inorganic and organic matter. The eye is incited to feel the different treatments of matter by time thus perceiving the intimations of dramatic changes with a sense of familiarity and immediacy. a new palpability of vital facts emerging from other, opaque ones. These are facts of an ongoing underlying process arising, as it were, out of contingency and the need for inner power which forces formation from inside to the outside while the co-ordinates of composition appear oddly discernible through a harmonized centripetal balance.

The difference of the expanding and exuberantly expressionistic gesture which looks as if suspended by compliance with the hierarchized rules of an invisible determinacy reveals the painter's disposition to contemplate the processes that take place in the space-time of archetypes, of the collective subconscious of nature's phenomena, of existence both in our proximity as well as in the remotest reaches.

The world as magnification of detail and reduction of maximization appears in the work of Mrs. Cleopatra Varveropoulou as a stratification of depictions of the potential of the visible. By means of mixed materials and a biodiversity of scripture and manner, the intensities of colour, contrast and volume relief afford segmented or fragmentary forms that reveal the reality of the subsiding and exaltations of transfiguration. Transfiguration of matter, gesture, rhythm and light, claiming a new space of life and transcendence,

In Renaissance years. Leone Battista Alberti speaking about his work pointed out that it was "as if we saw the world through a window and so it was as if the image acquired limits". The works of Mrs, Cleopatra Varveropoulou urge us to feel the materiality of the opaque rules that prevail in cosmic space through trajectories and evolutionary processes. They equally urge us to feel the images through processes worked out by memory by associating them with the present time. The present of our nearby surroundings' brief duration and at the same time the prolonged duration of the wider environment that constitutes us.

Paraphrasing Alberti, we may say that the works of Mrs. Cleopatra Varveropoulou open up "doorways" not in order to frame each image for our convenience but to find ways to expand these frames mentally at areas reached not by our eyes but only by our suspicions. In other words. she shows us the origins of the gaze of prophets, of poets, of unprejudiced people who claim freedom outside conventions.

Athena Schina