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Shadows of the Present

Shadows of the Present is the third stage of a series questioning the human condition in our age – artistic ‘inquiry’ made by Florica Prevenda (the first two ‘chapters’ of this ‘visual essay’ also exhibited at Arthus Gallery in 1999 and 2001: Faces Without A Face and Net People).

Previously, Prevenda had focused upon faceless ‘portraits’, upon the grid heads of net people. The present group of works on canvas makes room for the coming back of the human body, but headless… So, these dramatic presences are still impersonal but, in my opinion, one can feel , somehow, the beginning of a revolt against uniformistation, alienation, behind the critical description on the net people condition.

We are offered simplified projections, spiritual images of the human being. In fact, we are dealing with only one, generic character and its multiple efforts to escape the prison of a self endangered by the presence of the media, by, often, the lack of communication, lack of time for inner dialogue.

The capacity of improving our present condition is mostly within ourselves. On the other hand, we search for an equilibrium between the inside world and the outside one, but  – some inscriptions within the bodies of Prevenda’s personages warn us – it is rather utopical to think that we could reach a perfect balance between a completely automationed environment and the (happily) unstable, unpredictable Human Being.

The artist is haunted by the shadows of the present – i.e. she is looking for harmony between her own identity and the others. She is eager for getting deeper and deeper into what defines the human civilization as a whole nowadays, at the beginning of the third millennium. She doesn’t avoid the temptation of fully enjoying the actual moment, she endures the painful – sometimes – day to day episodes of life, but more powerful is her need and will to transcend all these into the realm of the spirit. No other witness and effort is more fit and sincere into the context than her own work.

We identify two defining features for the works now exhibited by Florica Prevenda, for her starting point as an author: states of mind and structures. Intuition and control of the gesture are both important. Each work was developed step by step, not starting from a preconceived image, but from an impulse. The maturity of the artist but also powerful sensations, memories, the simultaneously active apollinic and dyonisiac dimensions contained in her creative ‘mechanisms’ leaded Prevenda in achieving the Shadows of the Present.

Searching for the Human, the artist goes deeper and deeper and reveals to us her character(s)’ stratified structures. Windows/screens are opened inside them; intimately connected with the interior strata of these impersonal bodies there are signs of the media, numbers, letters, words, camera captured memories, even a kind of mise en âbime of structures, by using printed images of previously created ones introduced in the present works. On the other hand, we notice the personages’ movements, sometimes almost tragical, their arms wide open, their fingers too, as trying hard to reach other hands and fingers, exploring the outside world, wanting to grasp reality…

As a paradox, the inner universe of these generic character(s) is offered to our visual and spiritual perception by the artist, so, together with various grids made of different materials – not to forget the often cold colours, the painter’s gesture – we perceive ‘circuits’ of bits of images, of faces, among which we sometimes discover Prevenda’s (she is a witness and participant of the Story of Life Today).

Even if the entrelacs of materials, the reliefs are solid, the nature of the elements, the rhetoric of the fragment lead to a poetic of the ephemeral.

The works of Florica Prevenda become, more and more, a meeting point of various modes of technical and plastic expression, they transcend the traditional category of painting towards that of the art ‘object’, even if the surface is the starting point and the pictorial vision, in an expanded sense, remains essential.

Some interesting coincidences with the ‘vocabulary’ of Jasper Johns make the comparatist pleasure of the critic. More important, we think we identity some encoding temptations: signs of the hand and the eye, grays, black and white, blue as colours of the spirit…

Prevenda transformed the dilemma figurative/abstract into a fertile dialogue; the interference of her ‘shadows’ proves it. The questioning of our present condition defines her ideatic horizon, but the artistic achievement is what contributes most to inscribing her work on an international orbit. The visual discourse in itself is vital for the powerful personality of the author. Florica Prevenda’s images come out of a proud need of expression and her ways to do it give birth to, we dare say, lasting cultural values.

Adrian Guta

Art Critic

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The adventure of the plastic sign, following both simple and complex roads, between abstract "concentrations" and "silhouettes" seen as sublimations of the spirit or of the self. This was the map of Florica Prevenda's painting over the past 4-5 years. The "pattern" originating in a simplified representativeness (in her canvases), the more "overt" figurative fits of primitivising expressionism (on paper) are but the prelude of a new ascetism to come, the latter prevailing in Prevenda's choices, everlasting stimulating challenge.

2. In the early '90s, the artist's abstraction is nourished with the fever of gestualism, of spontaneity and of the compression of the working time. Nevertheless, life's sinusoid often produces transformations in the equation of creation; the same thing happened this time, too. Dramatic experiences give new dimensions to the confrontation with the self, sometimes explosions turn into implosions. Withdrawal meant discipline and discretion.

Exuberance changed into distinction, chromatic subtlety withdrew from the surface in order to define depth. Several layers of colour, overlapping figures (alluding to the chronologic biografic "touch") made up fields of refined "plots", the paintings' weight resulting from coloured studied matter "concentrations". The plastic sign of American descent (Jasper Johns) turns into an European and personal one - these not being the author's strategy, but the critic’s comparatist temptations.

3. The came the figurative “breeze”, surrounding Florica Prevenda’s recent approach. Faces without traits, outlines of the head, maybe of the bust, in the surface of which accumulates the painted matter, again abstractly “uttered”. The idea of the portrait was pushed a little more farther in the ludic exercise, some other times proving to be definitely more dramatic than the “ascetism” on the canvas. Self referentiality gained – even if only temporarily – the right to expression – the signature “Prevenda” (as an element of the form) on a canvas underline that trend. On the other side though, the artist thinks that the figurative signs – partial silhouettes, insisting on the oval o f the face – are but acknowledgements of the explicit focus of her approach on the area of the spiritual (represented in effigy) at the level of the categories. It is probably a “double game”, either aware or not, between the personnel and the typologic, within the human species.

4. Abstract canvases of the ’94-’95, by their profusion of colour layers, already guided the critic’s thought to identify a certain pictorial “analogy”. Its “palimpsestic” side imposed itself to the eye, yet touch was also stimulated by the very matter-of-fact of the paintings – the discreet relief obtained by superposing paste. In her post 1996 – works, the concrete gains sope. Prevenda tries to experience a new artistic life down-to-earth matters, humble “tools” of the modern times: wire, clips, nails, paper, gauze. Collage accompanied by such elements belong to a process which remains under the esthetising control of post war abstraction. Elements exterior to the pictorial paste work together with it; the whole is unified by colour. Simultaneous stimulation of sight and touch is present again. Matter has become more obvious. On the other hand, significant semantic signals have started to appear.

5. What do “fences” mean – wire enclosures, grill – structures of certain works, metallic “sketches” superposed to the fields of coloured greys ? Why do wire strips, collage – concentrations of nails and gauze hide once more anonymous “visages”, covering their eyes or mouth ? Why does the visible mouth of some primitivising sketch (on paper) seems to speak silently , It’s a matter of communication here. Do we really manage to communicate with the people around us ? How cumbersome it is to live thinking that your words never reach the other, that you are alone in the desert made of people… How many times do we succeed in crossing over the limits of superficial, conventional communication, to get to the real, deep one ? The reality of these questions increases with the nature, form an destinations of the materials used in collages – some can hurt / other ones can heal: wire, nail, gauze.

6. And yet, beyond semantics, we return to the artistic goal, which is the most important for Florica Prevenda, at least at the level of the conscious. Nails, gauze, candy boxes, oil colours, wax, all these matters submit to the rules of form and colour and produce rhythms – the sense of rhythm she exercised both during painting and when passionately listening to classical music, vocal and instrumental. Recent painting dominate her studio. I feel surrounded by aristocratic pictorial presences. Florica Prevenda’s painting preserves some preciousness of the “higher art” in the direct sense of the word., not obliquely as opposition. (reconcilable by the postmodernism) to the “mass culture”. We are here in front of an art chich can prove its quality everywhere in the world (having already acknowledgments of this type); it is an art conceived here, fully personified, able to live on any cultural meridian, without having any “integration” problems.

Adrian Guta.

Art critic.