SCULPTURE ‘100 DREAM SHAPES’
I am interested in translating my paintings into sculptures. In this concern, I looked at what I could do to appropriate different parts of the painting with a sculpture. I have started to address the paintings with simple forms which I can take out and transform into a three dimensional shape. I developed a synthesised approach that creates a physical dialogue – a singular language that can be continuous in painting and sculpture. ‘100 Dream Shapes’ presents a carnivalesque native folklore mixed with Super Mario like fantasyland. 100 pieces of 3D work made of Matisse like cut-outs arranged in an architectural studio style. They have 100 different titles (eg. Marge Simpson, Miley Cyrus) making a dissonant connection between popular culture and abstraction. The works use simplified themes to subvert reality, how a sculpture should look and be realised; with a quasi-primitive and superficial look their spirituality is poetic. ‘100 Dream Shapes’ is a sculptural chronotope exploring time and space, history and the future. There is a sort of synaesthesia happening at some point and desire becomes part of the work.
I am interested in aspects of pureness – how to create and present sculptures that would be industrially easy to make, would show the medium combined (concrete, plaster, wood etc) but also ideas that can link the old with the new, the ephemeral with the infinite, the shape with the colour, the abstract with the recognisable object. I started digging deep, Brancusi, Michelangelo, Koons, Lucas, Houseago, Brown and the entire art history, jumping into architecture and sound. My mind was drawing endlessly and my hand would follow it, paper after paper, drawing after drawing, I would start to envision ways of dialogue between my paintings and my sculptures. The shapes were already there. I only had to take them out separately. Creating this series of sculptures felt so fresh like I was engaged in a spiritual conversation with a deity, like I was sensing everything that was around me, the smell of life and the possibilities, the connections that entice my brain, it’s like having the entire world in my head and creating infinity.
Cutting shapes out of wood with the jigsaw was only anticipated by my early school days in the professional ateliers in Constanta. The shapes are now fully grown and breathe air in them. Once I cut them I put them in a plaster or concrete base. The base is made out of ready-made rubber cups and flower pots, plastic bottles and anything that can be filled in really like Rachel Whiteread’s work. After the sculpture is fixed I colour it. I mix the colour and paint it by hand. This way I can exactly make the colours that I want. I am thinking of colours like Damien Hirst thinks of his Spot paintings, every spot a different colour. I have the RGB/CMYK range in the back of my head. Sometimes I go on a computer and do a drawing. I find that colours on a computer are very radiant.
My very thought of art is flowing in the exotic rivers of colour. Always new and shiny, fun and happy. The forms are just parts of anatomy, parts of nature, flowers and fruits, buildings and shapes. Imagine this brand new landscape where everything is possible and conceptions can be changed into fantasies, and fantasies into reality – a city of the future like Corbusier’s imaginative ‘Radiant City’ but more into our days, more radiant and more alive than ever. My degree show this summer is a forest of ‘things’ that portray the relationship of man and the future – the conglomerated things, primitive and carnivalesque, riotous and floral. Daft Punk, Brancusi and Picasso mixed.
