Exhibition viewExhibition view”Dark Matter”, acrylic on canvas, 150×90 cm, 2020”I feel blue”, acrylic on canvas, 150×90 cm, 2020”Going up”, acrylic on canvas, 150×90 cm, 2020”2 steps”, acrylic on canvas, 150×90 cm, 2020 / (performance documentation)”2 steps”, acrylic on canvas, 150×90 cm, 2020Exhibition view”Small broken mirror II”, acrylic on canvas, 50/70 cm, 2020Exhibition view”Exercise for image decoding”, acrylic on canvas, 180×200 cm, 2020”Untitled |white|”, acrylic on canvas, 20×30 cm, 2020
Pressrelease
The exhibition proposed by ALB (Andreea-Lorena Bojenoiu) continues her artistic research on the materiality of the pictorial process carried on in recent years, using deconstruction to obtain an artistic commentary on the painting understood as an image.
Deceitfully simple, Andreea-Lorena Bojenoiu’s experimental painterly practice is immersed in the materiality of the painterly gesture that has been resurgent in contemporary art in the last decade as a result of a renewed attention to objecthood. Her patented and skilfully-mastered technique of stripping off layers of paint suggests an attachment to the materiality of the act of painting (and to painting as a process) and an indifference towards polished and commercially appealing materials. But what they actually perform is an iconoclast archeology of the image.
Refusing to adhere to common notions of visual representation in favor of an excavated painterly flatness, her objects are devoid of articulation and composition, aspects which are replaced with a strategic decomposition of images in opaque and solid layers of paint. The resulting images are lacking any mimetic qualities. They revoke any transcendence of the painterly space, together with the imaginary reality of the canvas regarded as a screen. Bojenoiu’s painting is at the same time non-representational and anti-aesthetic, reacting to the proliferation of digitally produced images in an increasingly virtualized social medium. Its refusal to expose, describe or comment upon a fragment of external reality is accompanied by the abandonment of abstraction as a process of reduction and the mental essentialization of a captured image (archived in human memory or on a technological medium).
Painterly performativity, usually tied with expressionist or abstract gesturality, as well as with the more traditional notion of „the brushstroke”, is also crucial for the artist’s experimental focus on painting as a process. Thus, painterly matter gains agency instead of remaining a mere container of ideas and sensations. It seems to act as an extension of female corporeality, an absent element which underlines and coordinates the scene of representation, undermining the binary oppositions between represented and productive femininity.
