Efemer & Magma | by Aurelia Mocanu | No. 316, 2018
At about a decade later, at the turn of the years 2017-2018 the ground floor of Mogoșoaia Palace happens to be inhabited again by a new plastic research of Florica Prevenda characterized by the same solemn accord of whitish, black and gray shades. Picto-reliefs with lamellar collage made of thick pressed printed matters and big drawings in aquatints made of acrylics on paper-cardboard—all “condense the ephemeral”. Recup’art and infra-plasticism mean in Prevenda’s case the recycling of cellulosic materials hardened with adhesive, obtaining an unwonted texture-relief on the canvas of the painting. Extremely diligent and with a handwork of “Persian knot”, the artist sketches the dynamics of new compositional balances always underlain from one suite to another by an ideative controversy.
After the exhibition in Sibiu in the autumn of 2017 (at the Brukenthal gallery dedicated to contemporary art) on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Museum, Prevenda places on the cyma from Mogoșoaia Palace a discourse in crescendo. There are some sharp tones of vivid colours in the continuous flux of nacreous grays of the canvases and the finale of the seven drawings in black and white is percussive, in a gamelan resonance. The recent graphic production begins in charcoal, then gets more and more dense in tonal layers and striae. We deal with an invocation to the dynamics of the ascensional spiral or of the circle dynamized with divisions of vectors into sections and with a core of interwoven hachures in white or black paste.
Prevenda stands next to other two feminine great names of contemporary Romanian painting—Paula Ribariu and Ioana Bătrânu—as an example of tenacity in her plastic research regarding the “humanist” problems which organically develop from one exhibition-cycle to the other. In a dialogue with the spirit of her time, the painter composes in a quasi-abstract and dynamically subtle way, certifying a “plastic” form of relief made of matter in thick coats through which she grants more density to the surfaces of her canvases. It is a way of meditation on the entire magma of emotions and anxieties which haunt the human condition nowadays.
Paradoxically, invoking until now the shadow of the human, the great pictorial-objectual suites of Florica Prevenda bear witness to her poetic and stoic capacity of withdrawal from the mundane. In the retort-like studio, the artist passionately frees her feelings in the elaboration of the body of the pictoriality created by her. Prevenda generically works on the canvas with stratified densities, with grids, with screens and rhythmical deposits of reliefs. She moulds, she spreads with her fingers: breaking up, spinning, interweaving, casing in. The coloured matter is brought out in bold relief, germinating on furrows and lines. In the cycle “Ephemeral” from 2017, the soloist structure is plain and smooth: a block of printed papers cut on its thickness. With each thematic series the artist in fact establishes a new “plastic” processuality. Subsidiarily, the procedures come out of the interrogations with the spirit of an age insidiously threatened by a consumerist reification and depersonalization. On a minimally figural texture (until the last series) Prevenda constantly resorts to the set of emotions and anxieties which haunt the human condition at the threshold of this century. The striking message (of an existentialistic and ethical nature) gets materialized precisely in the striae, the pellicles and the crusts of the tones-matter. In the stylistics of the artist, a great part is given to the dosage between the textural procedures that she consonantly applies to the levels of introspection from the experience about the image and the communication in the acute present. “The Effaced Face”, “The Presence as Inconsistency of the Shadows”, “The Urban Horde”, “The Communicational Networking and Its Vacuity”, “Publicity-The Trade-The Waste” are some of the explored metaphorical fields. In 2008, also on the ground floor of Mogoșoaia Palace, the exhibition “Time Regained” represented an ample autoscopy of a photographic diary graphically processed and densified through the technique of collage.
The recent silvery archipelagoes of lamellas (made of stacks of commercial leaflets) have the compositional dynamics of the cutting up of the migratory motif characteristic for Jean Arp or Miró. On some canvases, the grouping of small alveoli which nestle the vivid colour reminds us of the histology of microscopic lamellae or of the territories of exotic cultures in a bird’s eye view representation.
I am trying to fix a terminology, just like in the case of the term “abakan” which was coined from the very personal production of a distinguished Polish artist of the spatial textile. From the plastic notion of “relief” I would cut up—for a linguistic play of defining—the “ef” present also as the initial letter in “Florica” and compositionally played by the artist in the ample suite dedicated to “Facebook” (2013-2015). What painter Florica Prevenda has been elaborating on many and great cycles even before 2000 is a raising of the pictorial coating as a toilsome and incantatory labour on organic and abstract fields. The “ef” from the series “Efemer” can be directly understood also as “neo-Mertz”. It is a reference to the vehemently anti-consumerist Dadaist concept of the solemn Kurt Schwitters. His collages made from domestic wastes had left cut-up—at a crucial moment—the last syllable from the printed “Kommertz”, and thus the “Mertz” was going to become a concept in the history of art. What Prevenda does at present with the pile of prospectuses and leaflets: she massifies them, she presses them, she cuts them in their thickness, she sticks them lamellarly like some small delicate waves on open and floating compositions. They are squaring of the circles, condensing the ephemeral. In “ef”s…