Traces of the present
curatori Mălina Ionescu, Călin Pecana, Târgu Jiu, Ro
…fragments of my diary, key-words or personal experiences are written in code, in self-defense. The text is written in Braille alphabet, but some of the letters are replaced with thorns, and the touch necessary for the reading becomes impossible.
”Andreea Medar bases her visual alphabet on several – different and only apparently contradictory – premises. Her inscriptions are at the same time impossible to decipher and immediately lectured, because beyond their literary meaning they become visual signs, images which offer the viewer their entire emotional, personal and subjective content. That which Andreea Medar transmits (or avoids transmitting) comes from her inner universe, from her direct experience, from her personal history: messages or phrases with a meaning impossible to fully understand from the outside. This very emotional reticence in directly communicating a message which would offer the key to her entire artistic approach is doubled, visually, by a paradoxical opening and freedom in what concerns the media, expression, technique and materials she works with. Here she plays – or is open for the play – with haphazard, and the form of the message is often surprising and completely independent from its meaning. The message is therefore not as much the content of the artwork, but only one of its elements, alongside the thorns, the suffering human shape and the somber or minimal color. The works of Andreea Medar can be, at a first glance, lectured as investigating the drama of the human existence, but there is a playful dimension in the expression that opens towards a different interpretation. The ciphering and the hiding of the message are not emphatic or rhetorical – in spite of the dramatic expression, but they translate in the most direct way the visual sublimation of the personal experience and sensitivity, a visual expression which, with its entire emotional charge of an extreme reactivity, transmits the complete freedom and the play with the infinite possibilities offered by (only) the artistic expression.” (Mălina Ionescu)
Photos credit: Medar Mihai