Andreea-Lorena Bojenoiu

The Archeology of the Flatness

September 10 - November 05, 2020

The exhibition proposed by Andreea-Lorena Bojenoiu (ALB) continues her artistic exploration of the materiality of the pictorial process, an inquiry she has pursued over recent years. By employing deconstruction, Bojenoiu offers an incisive artistic commentary on painting understood as both process and image.

Deceptively simple, Bojenoiu’s experimental approach to painting immerses itself in the materiality of the painterly gesture—a quality that has resurged in contemporary art over the past decade due to a renewed focus on objecthood. Her patented, masterfully developed technique of stripping layers of paint underscores a deep engagement with the materiality of painting as a process, while deliberately rejecting polished or commercially appealing materials. This approach results in what can be seen as an iconoclastic archaeology of the image.

By refusing conventional notions of visual representation, Bojenoiu replaces compositional articulation with a strategic decomposition of imagery into opaque, solid layers of paint. These resulting images eschew mimetic qualities entirely, rejecting both the transcendence of painterly space and the illusionistic reality of the canvas as a screen. Her works exist in a liminal zone between non-representation and anti-aesthetic, challenging the proliferation of digitally produced imagery within an increasingly virtualized society. This refusal to depict or comment on fragments of external reality is accompanied by a rejection of abstraction as a reductive process of mental or technological essentialization.

In Bojenoiu’s hands, painterly performativity—traditionally associated with expressionist or abstract gesturality, or even with the more classical notion of the “brushstroke”—becomes a central focus of her experimental approach. Here, painterly matter itself gains agency, acting not as a passive container for ideas and sensations, but as a dynamic force. This material agency aligns itself with an implicit extension of female corporeality, an absent yet coordinating presence within the scene of representation. This presence destabilizes traditional binaries between represented and productive femininity, adding a critical layer to the dialogue her work creates.

Curated by Cristian Nae.