Antoniadis’ ultra baroque poetry is characterized by the proliferation, juxtaposition and overprinting of iconic, decorative and geometrical motifs, together with the trompe l’oeil of sumptuous tapestries, brocattos and silks, garment designs and textile wefts whose different morphological and semantic thicknesses reach a climax in an unification of surface, strictly flat. Indeed, the craziness of seeing and touching, camouflage, ludic physicality, mimicry, hyper simulation, polo centrism, concentration, dispersion and fragmentation are the artist’s favorite strategies. Her esthetics may be interpreted as a cultured revisit of the complexity and diversity laws, present in the concept of the bel composto, born with historical baroque. In this sense, Antoniadis paints, decorates and turns her pieces baroque, precisely to exorcise her own excesses. Hence, the artist places herself at the same time in a position of agreement and conflict with those same extracts of the past which she resorts to time and again to use them, quote them, criticize them or ridicule them in a parodical and sarcastic manner, from the threshold of an uncertain and anguishing present.

Antoniadis behaves as a real Mnemosyne, placed at the ending of the XX Century and the beginning of the brand-new third millennium. Her hybridizing poetry is the phenomenon of a frantic iconological memory in which a look at iconographic codes and repertoires from different textual encyclopedias are combined as in a stylistic patchwork. However, though the artist quotes, she also breathes and stands back.

And, while she does go through mimic gestures, she later disguises, extrapolates and covers them with a mask, in an operation of estrangement from such referents, which acquire more power and a different meaning in a new context.

In El delito de la belleza (“The Crime of Beauty”) the dimension of the pure aesthesis, i.e., of that esthetic delight obtained from seeing while recognizing and recognizing while seeing turns into the ideal starting point of a sensorial trajectory in which the ambiguity and rebelliousness of an – almost criminal – beauty functions as the counterpart of a lacking, of an absence of being. This hiatus and caesura is located deep inside, acting behind the ornament’s beauty and corresponds to Lacan’s proposal of the not-being of what is beautiful. A layer of melancholy and perversity, coinciding with the splendor and ecstasy of the form, turning into Antoniadis’ work’s leit motif. That dark background is nothing else than the fuscum subnigrum, which Leibniz had identified as the baroque monad, a sort of cell or sacristy with no opening to communicate it to the exterior, though very autonomous. Both the monadic configurations that weave parallel micro-narrations in a same picture as the beautiful and sinister radial vortexes appear in a recurrent manner in Antoniadis’ latest works, in drawings where rhythm, redundancy and regular and irregularly programmed serial repetition prevail.
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Híbrida (“Hybrid Woman”) (2002) a monumental oval form shaped canvas measuring 200 x 150 cm., contains an attractive, excessive and monstrous feminine icon that merges with the programmed chaos of a geometrical background. It represents the beauty of certain fractal configurations of rhythmical progressions with irregular variances. Here, the figure is seen by the artist as a cliché or stereotype of gender art, attached to a streaked background, with which it tries to match, becoming a streak itself. It is a hyper-body of a clonic prototype, absolutely enormous and disproportionate, generated from a post-rereading of certain procedures typical of pop art and optical art that Antoniadis makes.

Híbrida is an impossible woman and functions as a real magnet for the eye. In her, the canvas’ ellipsis is duplicated through a redundancy effect in the characters’ head contour, placed inside a close-up. The inclusion of a smaller oval within a larger one is a symptom of that reflex or specular retombee, characteristic of baroque omni vision. It acts as a metaphor of the loss of the center, the instability and chaos prevailing in this turbulent and frantic contemporaneity. Híbrida, as well as her pair Ambigua (“Ambiguous Woman”) – another oval shaped canvas of the same size and also dated 2002 – are the result of the syncretic mixture of several woman models: the exotic, the standardized, the oriental, the occidental, the modern, the post-modern, the functional, the ornate, the child, the adult, etc. For this reason, they have no choice but to camouflage in a multicolored hug with the rainbow colored circles or elypses that cover their profuse backgrounds.

Similar but not identical to each other, these circles are painted in a flat manner, creating a kaleidoscope - like weft that vertiginously goes towards the first plane, competing with the image of the magnificent woman- fetish. Summing up, the counter-play between order an disorder within a growing entropy appears in this large group of works where luxury takes it place as voluptuous imposture while the artifice of ornament introduces itself as art and editing effect.