University Campus Suffolk

‘Da Funk’ is titled after a Daft Punk song and in it is a couple of intertwining figures. The setting is an open room with windows showing the tropical fauna. The language is surreal and sexual, and draws parallels to the present; dismantled body parts colliding methodically showing dramatic human features. You can hear the scream of a mouth painted somewhere on the canvas where another figure inspires a joyous festival of paint. These juxtapositions of emotions, happy, fun, angry and calm; could present a dangerous vision or a continuous daydream.

‘Dacia’ the title of one of my largest pieces is named after the first Romanian settlement 100 years BC before the birth of Romania, my native country. The painting is composed of imagined archaic shapes, relics, fossils and hybrid forms that form an idea of the tribal and primitive.

SCULPTURE ‘100 DREAM SHAPES’

I am interested in translating my paintings into sculptures. In this concern, I looked at what I could do to appropriate different parts of the painting with a sculpture. I have started to address the paintings with simple forms which I can take out and transform into a three dimensional shape. I developed a synthesised approach that creates a physical dialogue – a singular language that can be continuous in painting and sculpture. ‘100 Dream Shapes’ presents a carnivalesque native folklore mixed with Super Mario like fantasyland. 100 pieces of 3D work made of Matisse like cut-outs arranged in an architectural studio style. They have 100 different titles (eg. Marge Simpson, Miley Cyrus) making a dissonant connection between popular culture and abstraction. The works use simplified themes to subvert reality, how a sculpture should look and be realised; with a quasi-primitive and superficial look their spirituality is poetic. ‘100 Dream Shapes’ is a sculptural chronotope exploring time and space, history and the future. There is a sort of synaesthesia happening at some point and desire becomes part of the work.

I am interested in aspects of pureness – how to create and present sculptures that would be industrially easy to make, would show the medium combined (concrete, plaster, wood etc) but also ideas that can link the old with the new, the ephemeral with the infinite, the shape with the colour, the abstract with the recognisable object. I started digging deep, Brancusi, Michelangelo, Koons, Lucas, Houseago, Brown and the entire art history, jumping into architecture and sound. My mind was drawing endlessly and my hand would follow it, paper after paper, drawing after drawing, I would start to envision ways of dialogue between my paintings and my sculptures. The shapes were already there. I only had to take them out separately. Creating this series of sculptures felt so fresh like I was engaged in a spiritual conversation with a deity, like I was sensing everything that was around me, the smell of life and the possibilities, the connections that entice my brain, it’s like having the entire world in my head and creating infinity.

Cutting shapes out of wood with the jigsaw was only anticipated by my early school days in the professional ateliers in Constanta. The shapes are now fully grown and breathe air in them. Once I cut them I put them in a plaster or concrete base. The base is made out of ready-made rubber cups and flower pots, plastic bottles and anything that can be filled in really like Rachel Whiteread’s work. After the sculpture is fixed I colour it. I mix the colour and paint it by hand. This way I can exactly make the colours that I want. I am thinking of colours like Damien Hirst thinks of his Spot paintings, every spot a different colour. I have the RGB/CMYK range in the back of my head. Sometimes I go on a computer and do a drawing. I find that colours on a computer are very radiant.

My very thought of art is flowing in the exotic rivers of colour. Always new and shiny, fun and happy. The forms are just parts of anatomy, parts of nature, flowers and fruits, buildings and shapes. Imagine this brand new landscape where everything is possible and conceptions can be changed into fantasies, and fantasies into reality – a city of the future like Corbusier’s imaginative ‘Radiant City’ but more into our days, more radiant and more alive than ever. My degree show this summer is a forest of ‘things’ that portray the relationship of man and the future – the conglomerated things, primitive and carnivalesque, riotous and floral. Daft Punk, Brancusi and Picasso mixed.

PAINTING ‘THE FOREST’

My painting is influenced by art history, native folklore, oriental patterns, embroideries, tattoos, Indian abstraction, pre-Columbian tribal, Japanese inks, neo-expressionism, abstract figuration, monumental scale, flowers, design, street art. The works display an uncanny effect, where the familiar is liniar with the unfamiliar, and the known haunted by the unknown. I am using different symbols and signs to connect the viewer with the imaginary. The imaginary is infused with atmospheric thrills such as plants and fruits as in the painting ‘The Forest’. These thrills exist in the exotic flora and fauna of Suffolk.

I have been influenced by these surroundings in the last 3 years of my study, like a return to nature, I experienced the walks around Aldeburgh, Snape Maltings, inhaled the fresh air and saw the environmental developments of this area come to life. There is a great mistery in the skies, whenever I walked I felt the sense of vastness above me. Almost like Constable and Turner relocated me into their imagery of dark stormy pink yellowish skies – an incredible range of colours the skies have. I was attracted by this manifestation of nature. Seeing the trees move and the wind blowing in my ears was like a live spectacle, as if watching a band of lively things perform. It blew me away, and I am sure everyone would feel the same.

I painted ‘The Forest’ with soft fat lines. The beauty in this painting is that you can distinctly see all the influences come together, but it is much more than the sum of its parts. Somehow the forms that emerge from the composition are spontaneous and have anthropomorphic features. The lines are catchy, rhythmic, circular and sharp. The clashing between colours and shapes is raw but there is some sweetness to match up with the sour. In my real life I was working in restaurants as a waiter and while there I notice the arrangements on the plates, the fruits and the vegetables, the meat and the sauce. ‘The Forest’ can also resemble a dish, a Spanish Paella very carefully arranged on a plate, a pizza or a bowl of fruits. like I am doing those plates and bowls on canvas. I paint with my fingers so that I can feel the paint, it is almost like eating with your hands.

‘The Forest’ is innocence lost, adventuring into the mist of the present, identity lost and found at the same time. A place inbetween reality and fantasy where the body language is portrayed in a dissonant way, dismantled, colliding methodically with genitalia and other behavioral systems that form a the big picture. I wanted to depict a big dog and then I found out about the Black Shuk, a legend about a ghost dog that exists in Suffolk. ‘The Forest’ is becoming this big pile of gruesome things. You can hear the scream of a mouth painted somewhere on the canvas where another figure inspires a festival of joyous explosions of paint. These juxtapositions of shapes, happy and fun, angry and calm, could present a dangerous vision or a continuous daydream. It is this alert reality that is envisaged in ‘The Forest’, the cultural mix, the wild life, tribal, sophisticated and primordial.

INFLUENCES

My works of the last months have started to take a more precise shape and have boomed in colour and form. I have realised that from working in all these diverse mediums making a banana out of fibreglass, a plaster sculpture or painting figures I started to understand colour and form more, also the materials I use. Everything had a contextual back-up from the start and helped me develop my ideas further. The ideas that I have can now move on because of that. The simple form, the pure colour and raw material is what captures my imagination. I am interested in the essence and the archetype like Constantin Brancusi.

In the last 2 years I had the chance to see the work of great British artists such as Sarah Lucas and Glenn Brown. The playfulness and soft rounded shapes that Lucas employs in making her sculptures is a pivotal point for me. I am interested in perspectives of masculinity and feminine forms. I want to show the raw material (paint, wood, plaster, concrete etc) in my work, and Sarah Lucas helped me realise that.

Glenn Brown’s paintings are carnavalesque. Colour is in a state of permanent inertia. What defines his paintings is a mixture of high contrasts between paint handling and colour definitions. There is a sense of decay and floral playfulness in the way Brown treats the paint. I like the way he makes the paint look like it has been smudged or blurred so that they look as if they were painted in thick brushstrokes and they are not. Then his sculptures are only about the thickness of the paint. This is what I saw in his work, the connection between painting and sculpture.

Thomas Houseago dismantling of sculptural body into flat plaster shapes is very striking. He is a British sculptor working with various media: plaster, wood, bronze and many more. His provocative sculpture is reportedly influenced by works of Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Paolozzi and Henry Moore. According to critics, his expressive technique evokes associations with topics of sex, violence and human physiology. What interests me in his sculptures is the uniform attractiveness of the rounded shapes, white colour, and colossal dimensions. They have a prototypical feeling to them.