I started this series of 100 drawings and paintings during the Covid 19 locked-down as a means to extend my limited surroundings. While some of the works were informed by “traveling” through Google maps to places I have planned on visiting this summer, others where either visual responses to my immediate surroundings, or were based on an overlap of imagery: some borrowed from reality, other which was constructed. This survivalist exercise reminded me of growing up in Romania, a then Communist country where one had to reconfigure mentally reality in order to endure it.
I am generally interested in 1) the mechanics of motion, its visual translation and the dichotomies intrinsic to it (transfer vs. change; action vs. reaction); 2) how memory relates to perception, and 3) the fluidity and tension of contradictions (organized chaos and uncontrolled order).
However, while working on this new, ad-hoc series, I had no preconceived idea what art is, nor how it should look like; I left my academic guard down. It was rather a full embracement of immediate visual translation of sudden and un-distilled idea. Any accident was turned into an event.
As an artist, I am interested in choices: what remains to be seen, what is absent and how decisions are made. My working method is intuitive, and process based. Yet, the story of the mark which take 3 seconds to make it but 30 years to learn how to make it was valid. The more I continued working, the more the works started to inform and sustain each other in a non-orthodox and unexpected manners. This approach allows me not only to respond to what I am working on, but also think of the next works. Thus, the work makes the works.