BFA Defense Exhibition at CIA

In 2016 I graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Cleveland Institute of Art.

This is my Exhibition statement and body of work.

” [re.ve.de.re]

I grew up speaking and still speak only Russian to one of my parents and only Romanian to the other. After moving to the United States I learned a third language, English. On a daily basis I navigate three different cultural and linguistic structures. I make expressive figurative paintings that are rooted in this experience. The paintings capture a sense of simultaneity, intuition and internal conflict. I intertwine different painting styles, different energies of applying the material and degrees of abstraction to create complex, visceral images.

The imagery in the paintings is both figurative and abstract, the pictorial space is surreal and the surface is rich with a variety of marks. The paint is seductive and its complexity holds the viewer’s attention. The color is at times bright and artificial, at other times it resembles the fleshiness of a body, or the metaphorical muddiness of the internal conflict captured. There are always figures or figurative elements depicted in the paintings. The figures are often deformed, or consumed by the abstract surface, other times forms are tightly rendered. The surreal quality of the paintings includes a psychological dimension and a nonlinear narrative.

There is a sense of urgency and obsession in the way I handle the material. I rely on intuition to create the gestural abstract surface. At times I start analyzing the form and finding figurative elements that I systematically exaggerate to create a body like presence. The different tactics used while painting resembles my use of different languages.

There seems to be a secret in the simultaneity captured in the paintings. The presence of multiple pictorial voices speaking at once create a cacophony that is distorting a coherent visual message. One can relate the experience of the paintings to the daily experience of navigating complex social structures, family, friends, work, social media, globalization. This opens up to multiple contradicting voices that distort what we might consider real and our own identity in this world.”