Janis Rafailidou was born in 1984 in Athens, Greece. For the last three years, she has lived in Leeds studying for a degree in Fine Art.
The experimental, non-profit television clip was produced in Leeds during March 2005. The short film is a based on a ‘personal’ moment of a female painter’s life at her studio. (Producer/ Filmmaker - Janis Rafailidou, Camera - Dario Llinares) Janis' synopsis
 | | Filmaker: Janis Rafailidou |
"The context of the film stands as a metaphor upon itself. It uses the figure of the artist-painter as an idolised and accepted cultural artefact.
"This popular image of the artist as the expressionist, the abstract modernist, who is possessed by some transcendental force beyond her control, has perhaps become the commodified stereotype to which one may aspire.
"The female painter (Janis Rafailidou) herself, represents an outdated creativity, free of any mental labour. The abstract expressionism suggestions of her body and of the paint could be correlated to a romanticized, nostalgic view of the artist free from aesthetic constraints or philosophical boundaries with perhaps on overtly sexualized, physicality drawn from mystical gifts.
"The symbolic nature of the film articulates the painter as the artist, the author, the interpreter of her work. Who and what is the artist? She is something that I aspire to be yet I am uncertain of the context in which she is defined. In the film, her figure is used as a representative product of modern culture’s ideology. Commenting upon the struggle of escaping the confines of a cultural imaginary which seems to dictate who or what we stand for.
"However, the film itself as a work is defines under the meanings of ‘conceptual art’, a latest modern art movement less accepted by the public." The film’s narrative is based on the advertisement culture, which pervades our everyday life. Its subject is inspired from the television advert ‘The Painter’ by Dissarono Originale (television campaign 2001). |
