In-Formare

11.07.2007

 by Ileana Pintilie / curatorial text for "In-Formare" Solo Exhibition / Calina Gallery, Timisoara, 2007 


The new exhibit, called In-formare, exploits the same artistic area of the painting placed at the border of figurative and nonfigurative, starting from a concept. In her perspective, the polysemantic word in-format "is trying to reformulate the possibility of shaping new directions bringing them together into the varied space of public opinion". Beyond the practical meaning, beyond the format - the person ending a process of searching, of assimilating some knowledge, in-format is equivalent to the person involved in a knowledge process directed toward a certain subject, a current one.

In her recent exhibit, she was inspired by the comments of Constantin Noica about the Human being from the text Romanian Feeling of Human Being. In this text, the philosopher identifies a manifold of the Human Being like the isotopes of a substance (the atoms of a chemical element, identical to one another regarding the chemical properties, but different regarding the weight and physical properties); on the other hand, she stated that, from an ontological point of view, three hypotheses of the Human Being would rather be possible: the first hypothesis represents the individual, the second - its determinations, and the third - the general state.

Starting from Noica's text, the artist identifies the ambient space as being composed of isotopes, manifolds of basic forms, biological cells on which any living forms are built. This isotropy reveals a micro-universe, mineral or organic which offers it a distinguished artistic pattern. This way, by the help of photographs, she studies the nature's forms, composed of these micro-universes that on a closer look suggest the absence of life in a cold season, just like in winter when the earth is frozen. The organic forms and the vegetal structures suggest a latent state, of preparing the birth of a new life around spring.

These transitory states, like the years glide past by - continuous unperceivable flow, like the sand grains from a clepsydra - talk about becoming and multiple determinations of things or beings contributing to the multiplication of forms in nature. And just like the isotopes these states are identical but always and gently different.

The artist uses the photographic images of these vegetal forms shaped like some kind of patterns, than transformed in objects by covering the photographs with a thick layer of wax that give them volume. Within the frame of painting, Liliana Mercioiu Popa takes over this conceptual pattern offered by the nature itself and modeled in a macro-universe. The organic or mineral structures populating her paintings are layered after certain energy nuclei resulting from stains of color and vigorous lines representing on their own turn real color nuclei. Irregular, chaotic forms seem to contain a certain type of fractality.

The same ambiguous subjects are found in painting: organic, mineral or even vegetal are grouping suggesting a preparation for a metamorphosis. The colors are dense, saturated, combinations of gray colored with dominating blue or dark red, while the forms are underlined by colored, gestural lines, diffused on the surface of the canvas. This restless painting lives through these vivid pulsations, emphasized by the black, gray or white contours giving forth to an additional graphical vibration.

In the dialogue opened by the artist between the micro- and macro-universe, the plans start to intermingle. Step-by-step the careful gaze directed toward the hidden layers of things is starting to intermingle with the one of the macro-structures. In this way her painting is not necessary abstract (non-figurative), because it does not refuse the surrounding reality, but represents a gaze that over-dimensions the vision of an universe composed of small structures, invisible in an unusual way. This way, at the very end, her entire plastic speech is focused on the questions directed toward the form, category defining the how the substance is organized. From this perspective, in-format seems to be equivalent to an intrusion in the depths of this substance which marks eventually the form.