"Zafferano o spezie" | LED sensorial installation 2005 | Aliki Polydor

Aliki's works in resin are extremely luminous with their orange conveying energy and fragrance, seducing the senses. In this LED lighting installation of this Iranian-born designer and artist, we find all the fascination, light, and magic of the East. It is not by chance that her installation reveals through LED lighting a meeting of colour, spice;  a combination that becomes illumination, sagacity, devotion, and well-being. In these rooms Aliki Polydor narrates and reveals the world, an itinerary that cannot ignore the meeting of different cultures.

"Aliki breathes colour and feels flavours and scents, she plays with the forces of natural elements and with visual, tactile, and olfactory perception in her joyful approach to artistic invention and creation."

These are the words of Camilla Bertoni in her telling presentation essay of the show. She also underlines the synaesthetic quality of the works and mentions various twentieth century artists who searched for points of contact between sound and colour,

"by building invisible bridges between feeling, sight, and hearing, as is attested to by the work of such artists as Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Luigi Veronesi, Vassily Kandinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and Bruno Munari".

Such interests have taken on even greater significance in some of her recent works.
Aliki uses saffron, with its intense yellow both an aphrodisiac and a cleanser;pepper in all its varieties of red, black, green, and white, or cardamom and cumin. These are spices that give a scent to the flower-light sculptures with LED lighting called “ZAFF”. A cristalized rug in resin, a "Road to the East" leads us into the dark room.We are drawn into Aliki's world, into her intimate room, a world consisting of persian olfactory memories, of spices, but also of flowers in soft, coloured resin. This is a camera obscura, a place overflowing with metaphors for life.
The climactic point of this sensorial/olfactory installation , this "inside" which is a closed container in wall to wall black plastic, there bloom those LED-lit flowers of which there were already traces earlier in her career. These are highly metaphoric images,resin sculptures that also evoke the intimate meeting of the sexes, alluding to the seed that generates life, to fecundation. A functional led -light inside the flower illuminates it and warms both the work and the surrounding environment increasing the scents of clover, cardamome and coriander even further. Here the synaesthetic aspect is underlined in a strong and purposeful way: there is a great sensuality enclosed in this camera obscura, one that is transformed into a paradise of the senses.
"Saffron or spices.." informs us that Aliki loves to convey the spice of life. She experiences emotions with great intensity and transmits them throught light to her art. In order to donate them.

Maria Teresa Ferrari.