Mihai Paul
LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW stubornness in being in contact with life.
The same as Yin has its Yang, white its black, up its down so on so so forth, so each representation has an abstract quality to it. Through the abstract I can trasform every representation into a story, a fairytale that I live in; this doesnt mean that I have a false perception of reality, if there can be such a thing, on the contrary I have a switch that can trasport me into another world, seeing the most“ insignificant” of things as the essence of life itself – as a Zen master answered when asked what is the meaning of life with“ 3 pounds of mud”.
The brushstrokes that condense your visual vocabulary and we have really appreciated the ethereal quality of Into the self. How do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works?
This has its roots in my percetion of reality that I approach, by choice. Some experiences of a mystical nature that I was fortunate enough to encounter, gave my surroundings an ephemeral and illusory substrat. Thus everything seems playful and quite hard to capture only within the boundaries of our sensorial perception. There is a quality of the mind that can dictate what is real and what is not – I`m not saying we can turn trees into dolphins by claping our hands. We can decide, and we do decide however, how serios any situation is or how important or how beautiful. In this way we create our demons and we burry them deep within and also we create our world – I can say that I live into my self, because myself is everywhere in different images. Even the tangible reality is affected by this, thinking that all inventions < which are as real as one could think of > originate in the power of imagination. This transcribes quite easily, more so than putting it in words, in my creations which are the embodiment of what I imagine. So in these lines, nothing is really real or really imaginary – they kind of mingle one with the other. Such sentiment took over me when I was sitting iddly in my room with an incence stick burning and my attention being drawn by the smoke. I looked and looked until the whole world emanated from that stick, like a ginny; and I stayed there bathing in the beauty of its dance and from it came“ The smell of burnt incence”, poem and painting, which represents exactly this concept of the real being imagined.
While marked out with a deep introspective quality, your painting are more than mere representations of your inner self: you rather seem to invite the viewers to an augmented perceptual experience to discover unexpected aspects not only of their inner world, but of the connectivity that affects our everchanging contemporary age. In particular your works and in particular you Study of clouds series brings forward that the landscape on which everything is happening: how would you consider the relationship between the inner landscape and the outside world? Could art provide us with a channel of communication between these aspects of reality?
Absolutelly. Art is enabling us to express what we cannot express in narative language, expect one is Shakespeare; even him failing to transcribe I`m sure, some feelings to his readers. We are condemned to live in the boundaries of our body and life, connecting completely with someone being quite rare if not impossible. Everytime when I share with someone, and this is one of the greatest actions one can take, my ideas, work or a simple conversation, I am not 100 % sure that I conveyed everything that was within to the other; and to add, can never be sure of such a fact. The only thing I can hope to accomplish is to bring the viewer to that state of consciousness where an introspective process can take place; to create a space within them where a familiar feeling arises putting a smile on their lips or a tear in the corner of their eyes. Because we are similar
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