Beyond Valentine – Curatorial Essay on Love, Art & Psychology | Annita Apostolidou Platis
A reflective editorial essay examining how love has been interpreted across centuries — from ancient ritual to modern psychology — and why art continues to reveal its deepest truths.
Published with The Alchemical Art
Beyond Valentine: Love as Ritual, Memory, and Artistic Consciousness
On Valentine’s Day 2026, my curatorial essay Beyond Valentine: Reclaiming Love Through Art was published by The Alchemical Art, Australia’s leading virtual and billboard art gallery.
The essay emerged from a simple but persistent question:
What remains of love once we remove the commercial framing, the spectacle, the cliché?
Across centuries, artists have returned again and again to the image of lovers — not because love is decorative, but because it is destabilizing. Love reshapes identity. It alters perception. It challenges autonomy. It exposes vulnerability.
In sculpture, painting, photography, and poetry, love appears not as perfection, but as tension.
In Klimt, love becomes interior radiance wrapped in gold ornament.
In Schiele, it becomes raw attachment, fragile and urgent.
In Kahlo, it coexists with pain, resilience, and selfhood.
In Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, love exists in suspension — the breath before awakening.
In Doisneau and Eisenstaedt, love is a fleeting interruption of time itself.
The psychological dimension of love is impossible to ignore.
Attachment, longing, projection, devotion, fear — these are not only emotional states, but artistic catalysts. Art allows these contradictions to coexist without resolution.
This is what compelled me to write the essay:
Not to romanticize love, but to examine it.
To approach it as ritual.
As myth.
As vulnerability.
As presence.
In our contemporary context, love is often performed. Displayed. Declared. Quantified.
But art reminds us of something quieter:
Love is attention.
Love is endurance.
Love is the willingness to remain in complexity.
Publishing this essay with The Alchemical Art marks an important extension of my practice. My work has always explored symbolism, transformation, and interior states through visual language. Writing allows that same inquiry to unfold through text.
It is not separate from my art.
It is another medium.
This collaboration reflects a growing alignment between curatorial writing and contemporary artistic dialogue — where artists are not only creators of images, but contributors to critical discourse.
I am grateful to The Alchemical Art for the thoughtful editorial integration of this piece and for cultivating a platform where art and philosophy can meet.
Beyond Valentine’s Day, the question remains open:
What is love when we remove performance?
Perhaps it is simply this —
The courage to remain present within emotional depth.
Read the full editorial feature published with the Alchemical Art:
www.thealchemicalart.com/beyond-valentine
Annita Apostolidou Platis
Visual Artist · Curator · Essayist · Fashion & Jewelry Designer
© 2026 Annita Apostolidou Platis. All rights reserved.