Painting as a way out of an existential dead end.
Codruța Cernea’s retrospective show, “The Rough Aura of Experience”, collects a series of works previously included in other projects. It’s a moment of reevaluating a means of expression, for which she’s had to restructure her resources, as well as her thought pattern. Painting was a breath of fresh air, entwined with a way out of an existential dead-end. Since then, she has revisited her decision many times.
For Codruța Cernea, painting means synthesising on canvas essential objects into forms that best express rules of composition and colour harmonies. It’s about symbolic forms, charged with a type of energy that radiates from within each piece. Distilling emotions, manifested, at times, through the gestures or traits of characters, and, at other times, through objects, replacing any type of narrative.
Camus’ statement “If life were clearer, there would be no art” could simplify artists’ lives, taking the myth literally, and seeing the artwork as a process, the piece itself – a mere by-product of a past era.
There was a time when I thought Sisyphus bore a resemblance to me, only that he’d been misunderstood. A guy, perfectly happy to roll his ball up the hill, enjoying each new day he gets to do it. Who doesn’t fret, simply because some people don’t see the point of what he’s doing.
Codruța Cernea’s conclusion is entirely different; for her, experience proves to be a high vibration, with one edge slightly sharper than the other.
Ioana Marinescu
Translation by Flavia Yasin
“The Rough Aura of Experience”, Codruța Cernea’s retrospective curated by Ioana Marinescu, opened at Cărturești Carusel on 16 March 2018 and ran until 16 April.
The show gathers works from earlier projects at a moment of reassessing a language for which the artist had to restructure her resources and her way of thinking. Symbolic forms charged with energy distil emotion through figures or through objects that replace any narrative.
