METABASIS

Following the artist’s fascination for plant life and corporeal partitions, METABASIS unravels fragments of an imagined biological world. Loosely inspired by museum displays or anatomical illustrations, a collection of fragments is re-mixed in a complex and intriguing visual puzzle.

METABASIS is constructed around the idea of transformation, of the continuity of an object in time. Two different artistic approaches, exhibited in parallel reflect the same concept employing different procedures. The canvases are depicting the evolution of these hybrid specimens in all of their varieties. Image transfers, prints, photographic impressions, as well as drawings, and painting overlap on the painted surface. Layers upon layers are added then removed from the canvas surface. Photographs of fruit, viscera, flesh, leafs or other fragments are digitally altered and morphed together. The resulting digital image is then used as a negative and printed on large films, then photographically impressed onto the paintings. Small gestural interventions are sometimes emerging from the colour layers below, or are overlaid onto the photographic emulsion.

Introducing highly aestheticized articulations of decay, light-boxes display dried kombucha film, cut into hide like shapes. Sometimes images are transferred on these skins. Kombucha is a symbiotic microbial culture, containing bacteria and one or several types of yeast. It is usually breed in sweetened tea, feeding on the sugar and fermenting the liquid in this process. Once removed from its tank, the biofilm dies and dries out in a couple of days, resulting in a thin, transparent membrane. Over a longer period of time oxidation darkens the material; it becomes opaque and changes colour to a dark shade of brown. The images, once imprinted on this material will also darken and disappear. This conceptual approach follows the metabolic development of a living being up to its death and deterioration.

Text by Ana Lemnaru, curator

“What makes an object recognizable? One might believe it is its form: a form not restricted to appearance or sight, instead bound to mental schemes and classifications. Images, as manifestations of objects, are compounds: part sensation, part classification. My work is nourished by the relation between the uncharted and unstructured sensations or associations and taxonomy, an inherited codification of the world.

I am constructing, creating and re-assembling different visual tokens. My works are populated by hybrid objects, contrasts, imitations and simulacra – sex mimicking love, living tissue mimicking dead tissue, transformation mimicking movement. Images undergo various transformations: their representation becomes manifold; textures are mixed, details are swapped. This process is designed to challenge their primary function or meaning, dissolve their individuality and rethink the relationship that might occur between part and whole. Individuated sensation and perception is more important to me than following a purely conceptual route; this results in works that are rather emotional and describe the visceral experience of perceiving an image.” 

– Floriama Cândea