Maro Vandorou, “LIMEN”

Artist Statement

Can a book about thresholds become a threshold itself?

LIMEN began in Pompeii, in September 2024, inside the Villa of the Mysteries. In Room 5, a continuous red fresco frieze unfolds with near life-size figures long associated with Dionysian initiation. Most readings approach the chamber through archaeological or Jungian frameworks of individuation. LIMEN is conceived in tension with those readings, moving instead along a Platonic axis: choice, necessity, and the daemon’s bond with the soul.

The work is not an illustration of the frescoes, but an initiatory encounter translated into the form of a book. It is built as a threshold experience: silence, sparse utterance, veiled visibility, and moments in which light decides what can be read. The turning of each folio becomes part of the work’s meaning; reading is slowed into a physical act of attention.

Materials are not background. They carry the logic of the work. Belgian flax, handmade by Gangolf Ulbricht in Berlin, takes light differently than paper: it trembles, breathes, and resists full disclosure. Goat vellum, thinned to transparency, behaves as skin, membrane, and veil. White ink rests at the edge of disappearance. The title is printed on the underside of the vellum cover, following the tradition of medieval scribes and illuminators who sheltered sacred words within the skin of the material itself.

At the book’s axis lies a single continuous line drawing: the dark-winged figure derived from Vittorio Macchioro’s 1931 interpretive drawings of the frescoes. It is not illustration but witness: the daemon’s presence held in one unbroken stroke. An incision in flax. LIMEN closes not in resolution but in suspension: a breath held between rupture and rapture. Born of Pompeii’s red walls, it burns white.

Maro vandorou

California, USA
https://www.ateliervandorou.com
IG:  @atelier_vandorou

LIMEN
2026

Translucent vellum (covers), Bespoke Belgian Flax folios, screen printed with white ink, letterpress printed colophon

13.8" x 8.3" x .4"

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