Hello Ioana and welcome to NotRandomArt. The current issue is revolving around the problem of communication and identity. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
Even if I currently live and work in Bucharest, Romania, I experienced living in various countries (Italy, France, USA etc.). Returning home has always been a way of dealing with the decomposition of tradition that I have felt wherever I went. For example, I found that it is unnecessary to know the language of the country where you go: the world is changing extremely fast, people are moving from a state to another, whether they are immigrants or not. We have easy access to mottled information from anywhere in the world, with the consequence that there are more and more "movement" words. In consequence, I’ve started searching for a visual solution to suggest the deficiency and lack of completeness, as a result of a culture fragmented by the agglomeration of information that comes together with the phenomenon of globalization. It is a poor but essential language, a Weltanschauung of contemporaneity, that I call “Incomplete Keyboard” (one of my projects that was born in June 2016, while I was living in Long Island, NY).
Would you like to tell us something about your artistic as well as life background? What inspired you to be in this artistic point in your life when you are now?
It has always been important to me to analyze my emotions and reactions. One way of doing it was to write notes that contained drawings, thoughts and reflections on art. With time I have started observing everything with much more attention. I was getting inspiration for my art from movies, but also from random activities present in my life like hanging out with friends or family holidays. All of these have gradually led me to the image I have at this moment on what visual art can offer.
I wanted, the same as artists of all times did, to immortalize moments of life. The key in my work is the wish to shape that moment from real elements, usable objects. I want to remind everyone that their home bedroom, the notes on the refrigerator or the wine stains on the carpet are all “art” and then that, gathered together, reflect the privacy of everyone, a mirror of our thoughts. How else can it be better represented “a moment of life”?
“3D HOTEL”, the project that I’ve been working on for the last four years, has been born from my wish to answer these kind of questions. It is a project that started from the desire “to look for a method through which I can express change, the becoming.” (A day in a painter’s life, 2015). The very first idea was to “catch” the beauty of all small “accidents” that we do by dropping some coffee on the table or bleeding because we had the mind somewhere else while we were cooking.
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about your identity as a participant of the visual culture?
It all came from the “Moulin Rouge” movie. Watching it had a grate impact on the way I used to think about my identity as a participant of the visual culture. Since then I understood that what I have to do is to create a specific atmosphere, to simulate this very intimate place for a person: their own room.
Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
In 2015 I did this painting called “Erasing the memory”. What I tried then was to visualize the way human memory works and transform it into a painting.
Later, in 2016, I experimented the performance of making a collage on a wall of my bedroom from images that I cared about along the time. It turned out into my very own gigantic collage, made from pictures with sequences from favorite movies, family memories, pictures I took, fragments from my writings, notes and self-portraits. I called it “A Wall” and I consider it even today as a point of reference in my artistic path. It explains very well what kind of role memory has in my art: “A wall can be much more than a mirror. In my case the walls of my room are more honest than my own consciousness. They have the quality of absorbing all the energy I consume in this room, where I paint, I write, I sleep, I dress myself and, from time to time, I eat. All these activities are just excuses... what I do, in essence, is continuously asking myself WHO AM I? WHERE AM I GOING? WHY? I keep reanalyzing situations.”
For my latest project called “3D HOTEL”, memory plays an essential role as well. It is about a character (a version of myself) that spends a couple of nights in a hotel room. Far away from home and duties, she lets her mind go free, becoming able to remember some events and people she would have never recognized otherwise. Thanks to these flashbacks of memory, she changes completely. “3D HOTEL” illustrates the atmosphere of the hotel room after her “metamorphosis” (recall to Kafka). The tricky part is that all this “fantasy” that I’ve created, comes as well from a very precise and personal memory: one night at LUXIA Hotel, 8 Rue Seveste, 75018 Paris, November 2014.