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
22