With Ioan Cuciurcă / Silvia Ionel / Alexandra Mas / Ioan Doru Vlădoiu
"Four artists have gathered at Simeza Gallery, whose beginnings are graphic arts academic studies, but fate and aesthetic choices have taken them to distant places. The passion and curiosity of the new media and their infinite fields of possibilities, not only widening the graphic perspectives but intensifying viewer’s perception, sensitivity and expectations as well as those of the creator himself.
Never has the image been so democratised, its consumption and production so free. The camera / video, the computer acting as eye, hand and imagination extensions, for which, traditional techniques’ obstacles and limitations no longer exist.
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Sun God & Indigniation III - Alexandra Mas |
Alexandra Mas, prolific artist, has built a career in France. What you will see here is but a tiny fraction of her work. Starting with the academic drawing, which she masters brilliantly, she traversed with bulimia a vast register of visual exploration which necessarily goes through photography and video to the most skilful digital manipulations of the image, performances or body art - work done with one's own body or that of others.
The Aurore des Temps series, of which some works are exhibited, deliberately converts aestheticism into ecological activism. Beyond that, I like to see in the figures of actresses Aurore Tomé and Athule Mbekeni, strangely modified by their gold leaf garments, reminders of chryselephantine statues of antiquity. Like a new Midas king, the artist, who never ceases to seek an ideal of beauty, seems to turn everything she touches into gold, assuming the risks of reification. But the model's eye, even drowned in splendours and chromatic shifts, continues to watch, lively, confronting from conscious depths, the multiple layers of submission and the constraints insidiously imposed on the flesh, on the skin and on our bodies.
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Burka - Silvia Ionel |
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Masque II - Silvia Ionel |
Silvia Ionel's imagination is dark, haunted by fantasies of human degradation or, that of a mutant civilisation where humans oscillate between extremes, unleashed in howls or on the contrary, with the hypocrisy mask at hand. The images, generated exclusively digitally, testify to the artist's fascination with the hard-hitting verism facilitated by new technologies and with which the hand, however virtuous, cannot compete.
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| Autodistruction - Ioan Doru Vlãdoiu |
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Mouvement - Ioan Doru Vlãdoiu |
Ioan Doru Vlãdoiu, with an unprecedented journey including his meeting with the great Octav Grigorescu within the Bucharest art school and a Canadian internship which connects him to a radically different artistic context, evolves in the modernist imagination, in occurrence, surrealist or abstract that he interprets with current technological tools. He is interested in the text / image relationship - transposition of proverbs with an absurd visual effect (One hand washes the other) but he is also attracted by the effects of movement (Dance), the textures, the diversity that creates the meaning of the materiality, either concrete has a symbolic meaning (Our daily bread) or abstract (Self-destruction)
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| Ioan Cuciurcã - Pensant à Leonardo II |
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| Ioan Cuciurcã - Corps et couleur II |
Last but not the least, Ioan Cuciurcã, graphic designer doubled by the curator with organisational talents, the one who has already set up ten editions of the annual Romanian graphic arts fair, welcomes us here with works chosen by programmatic selection under the digital perspective, the starting point of the exhibition. We find prints from the series Vast Stretches/Landslides, abstractions incorporating movement and the allusion of infinity. With Leonardo in Mind, it evokes the most famous figure of the European artistic heritage through a fully digital interpretation of Leonardo's drapery. In the quintuple centenary Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre museum, in 2019, an entire room was dedicated to the drapery of the great renaissance artist alongside the casts, reconstituted from the drawings, which seems to have served as model to him. Before this impressive anniversary exhibition, Cuciurca has already chosen the Leonardo drape, a Renaissance theme that encloses an entire artistic theory, to meditate on it with current tools. I can see here a logic of continuation that is not content to relate with nostalgia to the past, but for what it contains as future."
art critic Ioana Vlasiu
Art Show in Simeza Gallery, Bucarest from mai 17th to mai 30th
One of the most emblematic galleries in Bucharest, Simeza is in the heart of the city and has been welcoming artists and art lovers for several decades. Favourite place of UAP (union of visual artists) it has seen exhibitions by the most prestigious artists from Romania and abroad.
visual artist & art director
