"YOLO" - Anca Andreea Cobzaru, by Daniela Sand

Anca Andreea Cobzaru  is studying graphics (she is in her third year of university) at University of Arts and Design Cluj-Napoca. Her exhibition, "YOLO", was part of the Expo Maraton Cluj 2018, a competition for exhibition projects which takes place each May of the year. The exhibition was held at Galeria Casa Matei on May 10th.

The subject of the exhibition focuses on the unjustified hedonism of these days and the artist’s works present real aspects of the society. Central to these works is the phrase yolo  (you only live once) which is so overused nowadays in so many contexts and is every time related to positive and very joyful things. It seems that the young generations are often mistakenly using the phrase, they tend to give it wrong meanings, so the real meaning of  the concept is therefore misunderstood. They tend to send messages with no essence because they don’t always assume the things they do and the absence of justification lead to a partially assumed state of hedonism.

On the walls of Casa Matei the works stand out pretty clearly and from the first glance they don’t look like anything that is related to the phrase yolo that you see or hear elsewhere - and that’s because the artist is mocking this popular phrase and uses not so positive depictions of it. Every work is centered around a single figure - for example one of  them represents a person, who seems very bored, staying on a sofa with a remote control in her hand - and another one depicts a man sleeping in his bed. We know nothing more about the characters from these appearances; we can only assume things about them. The irony is emphasized when the artist mentions the definition of yolo from the  urbandictionary.com - "carpe diem" for stupid people. Carpe diem is also written on the work with the person sleeping. To my surprise, the exhibition is pretty rich in color and the background music that the artist chose to accompany the works creates a distinct atmosphere, especially in combination with the space at Casa Matei.

I encourage readers to go visit Anca’s works of art - if you didn’t see "YOLO", the exhibition will be probably reopened on another occasion. She will also participate in another exhibition in Bucharest on May 19th  at Manasia Hub.

Tincuţa Marin, "Distorted Realities", by Vlad Dobritan, 2nd year ITA

“The presented project incorporates elements taken from the scenography, street art and everyday imagery, passed through the postmodern filter as a way of composing and by the expressionist filter as a way of pictorial expression. 

My paintings coagulate scenes that do not necessarily subscribe to an aesthetic attitude, but delineate the search for a very personal process of making the image. For me, this project is a complex challenge in seeking and acquiring an own style of state expression through an artistic approach that helps me to reach the unique way of releasing my gesture in response to the chosen subject. The images taken from them are de-structured and re-composed to create various, magical and dynamic compositions, completing the collages through the basics of pictorial-gesture, line, spot and shape.

In my works I discuss the problems related to magic, dream, form and composition, metamorphosis of the perception filters, the characters rendered by me being deformed, with strange atypical faces. I like to reinterpret the facts of reality into a world of mine, full of magic, beautiful, ugly, through deformations, elongations, twists and turns sending them into a grotesque visual area. I want to suggest the atmosphere of dreams, to express an emotion without resorting to narrative clichés. What I am interested in is the absurd, the exploration of the limits of reality, which can bring about an individual reality. "

 

artist's statement (our translation)

Without narratives, without heroes, the postmodern community is composed of masses made of atoms in an absurd Brownian motion —  and it’s fine! —because the big social stories break up; individuals find themselves in the nodes of communication networks socially positioning them and allowing them to perform movements in the middle of these language-based societies.

 As the society is atomized in simple language games, any statement must be considered a move made in a game — the players of the games respect the same rules to understand and accept each other; and that’s Lyotard’s greatest gift for us, it means that we can even build our own games as long as we can find someone to play with, someone who accepts and follows our rules of communications. Of course, these may seem like complications.

Those complications — of fitting in a society that works on  Lyotard’s theory of language game — spark in artist Tincuța Marin, in the wicked paintings of her own  distorted realities. She lives in Cluj-Napoca and studies painting at UAD; she lives, like every one of us, in multiple -language games- which bring to every one of us distorted views on things – views that even after expressed, will change their meaning in the eyes of the public. The artist reinterprets the common reality and gives us her own, which is a grotesque combination of ugliness, beauty, anxiety, and alienation – all this using her own language game rules.

 Where do the paintings power emanate from? The grotesque atmosphere is only a foyer to the effect. I think Tincuța’s intense awareness of her own emotions  is part of it — how she tries to find a style that would allow her to express herself in simple  gestures, and to be able to express emotion without narrative  clichés— that quest on itself becomes the source of power  for her works. 

That’s what Tincuța’s show at Expo Maraton’s VII-th edition made  me think about, the postmodern self, the search for a game  you can belong in by finding the rules— or creating your own. How do you face those distorted  realities?

photo credits Vlad Dobritan