Florica Prevenda, a Solar Spirit | by Madalina Mirea | April 29, 2016
Two years ago I accepted an invitation that honoured me: to write about Florica Prevenda’s exhibition from Annart. At that time I couldn’t fulfil that task and I felt a sort of embarrassment towards everyone involved. I didn’t hope the occasion would show up again. Yet between the 21st of April and the 7th of June the artist brought on the cymas from 39 Paris street a series of 20 works under the name Serenity. Faithful to the principle of not writing a single line about an artist with whom I hadn’t drunk at least a cup of tea, I had the opportunity, through a mutual friend, to spend half a day with mysterious Florica Prevenda.
I lived many years, as many colleagues of generation, having the impression that Florica Prevenda does not reside here in Romania. The fact that she exhibits here rather rarely justified our belief that she works in New York or in Bruxelles and she comes back only occasionally. I counted each international exhibition that she added in her honours list as a concrete proof that contemporary Romanian art has something to say, although we all know that the relations the Romanian artists succeed to build for themselves on abroad are not due to the institutional support, quite the contrary. The great Museums in Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara, Sibiu, Mircea Oliv in Bistrita, and in 2008 Doina Mândru from the Cultural Center of the Palaces built in Brancovenesc style from Mogosoaia organized exhibitions containing works of the artist. During these meetings I convinced myself that the impression I had had that she was an unapproachable person had nothing to do with reality. Prevenda is an artist to go a long way who spontaneously seduces you, like a pair of elegant cosy shoes of the best quality.
Technically, we speak about an exhibition of collage works in which the cardboard is surgically cut up in section. The figurative is a good pretext to show a good knowledge of proportions, which generates a comfortable equilibrium in the composition ,when evaluated by the onlooker. The austere chromatics of a great refinement is intensified by glazes and superpositions of planes and registers. The motives are running on the walls, the complex structures are catching liquefied islands in asymmetrical meshes, the generic child is multiplied and delivered to us with an almost imperceptible candour. And all this because Florica Prevenda succeeds in saving her works from any saccharine effect, laying the stress on the included light contained by all works and by each of them in part.
Serenity is about a child who walks towards the light entirely confident, in spite of his closed eyes. It’s about an angelic solar child with a scarcely guessed face who maps out a path with an elaborate configuration which is only apparently fortuitous. L’enfant qui boude is the profoundly sensible child radically different from the others, a difficult but desired child, equal with his own self and consistent. On his way he lacks nothing and nothing is useless for him. He walks with his arms above his head, carrying offerings of wheat or grapes depending on the season, being purged from the excessive carnation of baroque cherubs. He permanently hears a voice in his mind, a voice which makes his soul avoid states of despair. He does not want to let his hands downwards as it would mean to give up, to surrender. He perpetually forgives, he never sits, he likes rummaging and travelling. When he does not create he meditates in a sort of self-imposed natural discipline, he observes and studies the solemn movements in order to directly understand the laws which govern the universe.
Serenity is about Florica Prevenda, as she really is.