Hearing the Matter Painting | by Aurelia Mocanu | February 1, 2008
In the domain of Romanian painting there isn’t a richer research about texture expressiveness than in Florica Prevenda’s retort-studio. At a first deciphering of the universe of the artist (born in 1959), “retort” can mean, thanks to her exemplary creative work, an undesirable but assumed confinement in the discouragingly narrow space of her studio.
Maybe it is this conjectural circumstance that reactively nourishes the conceptual intensity of her pictorial production. Prevenda has a discipline of professional survival that is at the level of European exigencies. Few people know such discipline and even fewer practice it in Romania. It’s not easy at all to rediscover each day the optimum tension to advance and to enrich the chosen stylistic step.
Florica Prevenda is- alongside of other two (feminine) names of present Romanian painting – Paula Ribariu and Ioana B_trânu- a model of tenacity in the plastic research in the problems that organically develop, from an exhibition to another. It’s in fact a “plastic” form of introspection in dialogue with the spirit of time.
From the fundamental theme of the Face (The National Art Museum, 1999) until the anonymous multitude of the silhouettes of the Metropolis (The Shadows of the Present, Simeza, 2004), the painter meditates (approaching the face schematically and in series) on the entire magma of emotions and anxieties that haunt the human condition nowadays, evolving towards the depersonalisation of all the nets and towards the consumist reification. This existentialist pithy message is embodied in Florica’s painting exactly in the rind, the leather, the scales, the scars, the imprints and the crust of the tones of white, grey, black and ochre of the wrapping cardboard. Her images do not become simpler from a cycle to another. They become poli-matters reliefs, with cassetons, with the zigzag rhythms of the goffered cardboard, with fields of numbers with schematized eyes and palms, with interweavings and garlands of paper bands or painted cloth. Therefore the artist neither performs in narrative scripts, nor composes after effects of rhetoric of the proper abstract image.
Prevenda composes, or more precisely she lays down visual-tactile matter, like the ashes of her feelings, over simple urban signs of human presence. The processes of growing of the images and of the matters they wear, the densification of the surfaces - symbolically speaking - build for the artist a niche of introspection. It’s a painting of emotional combustion, serious in inventiveness, without falling into the ludic. The technique of the artist produces an extremely rich pictural texture without intentionally recovering the ridiculous. Prevenda manufactures bricolating matters and materials without exalting the poverist non-finite. As the musical form close to her painting seems to be an ample organ tocatta.
Prevenda’s great picto-objectural suites assert, invoking paradoxically exactly the shadow of the human, the withdrawal of the artist from the mundane and the passionate abnegation in the material elaboration of the pictorial body and of its stratified density.