Monday on 20 February, 18pm, AnnArt Gallery opens its spring season with the Efflorescences group exhibition. The show brings together works signed by four artists from different generations and stylistic approaches: from the conceptual mechaninsms of Ioana Pioaru through the realist-figurative of Ioana Șetran and to the expressionist, fragmentary one of Daniela Făiniș and Arina Ailincăi.
Each of these four artists chooses a module as a measurement unit, without a programmatic character: if for Ioana Pioaru the module is represented by the kinetic mechanism, Daniela Făiniş configures her compositions around buds; Arina Ailincăi resorts to the human face as a measurement unit; and Ioana Şetran chooses the symbolism of fruit as a measurement unit. All four elements chosen by the artists are developed in the installation-objects, in compositional and stylistic efflorescences, resembling an imaginary museum, to paraphrase André Malraux.
Ioana Pioaru’s installation-objects are spaces destined to mechanisms, to mathematical rhythmicity, to the mechanized metaphor. The images were surprised by a cinematic eye (kino-glaz/film-eye), if we were to refer to “The Man with a Movie Camera”, the experimental movie directed by the Russian director Dziga Vertov in 1929. The stress on the dynamics of mechanisms and the avoidance of fictional models remind of this type of cinematographic image of the 1920s, with an important role in the development of realistic documentaries and cinematography. The simultaneous representation of all the sides of a geometrical form reminds of the idea of kinetic representation and it brings Ioana’s works closer to Vertov’s “kinetic eye”. Ioana Pioaru is concerned with the concept of “horror vacui”, the Aristotelian theory according to which there is no empty space in nature. The artist creates visual meta-spaces, interdisciplinary fields between visual arts, kinetic art, and engineering.
Ioana Pioaru’s installations question the current cultural industry and the presence of production factors in the work of art. The plastic material used in the compositions reminds of the multiplied, industrialized object and, at the same time, it calls the School of Bauhaus to mind. Economic reasons led to gaps in the production and the reception of works of art; Theodor Adorno claimed that this happened due to the objectification of the artistic product. The idea of mass reproduction is highlighted by Ioana Pioaru as well, who somehow criticizes it by resuscitating a classical technique of engraving, namely linoengraving.
Daniela Făiniş exhibits porcelain reliefs with floral imprints and gestualistic graphical interventions. Daniela is concerned with the physiological process of moving from the rest state, the state of a seed, to the active life, to the stage of efflorescence. She reproduces buds, inflorescences, bunches of plants. The artist brings to the viewers’ attention organic representations of stylized plants rendered fragmentarily, in order to eventually rebuild a floral areal. Daniela reiterates the art of fragmentation, not as a deconstructive language of postmodernism – as she usually does in her portrayals – but in a rather reconstructive way, a procedure that has profound significance in the 19th century museology; the fragments of Ancient sculpture are exhibited in order to recall a stage from the history of visual arts.
Entanglements of fruit rendered in a tridimensional manner engage space in an installation. Ioana Şetran’s works are genuine Renaissance studies which remind of Bernard Palissy’s ceramics, if we were to refer to the naturalist method of modeling form in porcelain. Ioana opts for the immaculate white of fruits, plants, or insects, she intervenes with colorful pigments very few times, precisely because she wants to keep the material pure. Passionate about the vegetal, the aquatic, or the animal environment, Ioana overlaps and juxtaposes the elements of an environment with those of another, so that the leaves become the elytra of stag beetles (lucanus cervus) which inhabit the inside of inflorescences.
The portraits signed by Arina Ailincăi are like ronde-bosse elements with interventions of form, color, materiality. The black contour of the eyes, the red of the lips on the white of the face, all these elements look like a quote from the 17th century Expressionist Japanese theater. The faces, or rather the masques, inspire serenity and harmony, as well as the state of meditation by means of which primordial energy QI is brought back inside the mind and the body. Even if the proposal for the exhibition consists in a series of porcelain expression heads, Arina refers to the entire body, constantly rebuilding the “body in pieces”. The apparent reunification counteracts the idea of fragmentariness which mutilates, dislocates, eviscerates. At a formal level, the portraits of an expressionist nature are completed by the graphical writing of the incisions and by colourful, gestualist interventions, with cobalt blue, browns, and ochers. (Raluca Băloiu,curator)
