The revealed face - the imagined face - the devoured face | by Corneliu Antim | May, 1999
Florica Prevenda proposes us a fascinating journey in one’s self through the fifth exhibition housed by the National Art Museum in the halls destined to contemporary art. It’s the most coherent and limpid plastic speech of the artist until now; it is not the impulse of the amiable eulogy that urges us on such evaluation, but the moving substance of this speech based on an aesthetic and philosophical well-defined creed, with a powerful impact on the spectator.
The theme of the exhibition has a stake – the portraits of some moods –which represents in itself an artistic bet with a large palette of chances. The polemic tension caused by such an approach inspires the artist with a practically unlimited freedom both in the proper development of the subject and in the means of expression.
The images that come to life have their origin in the abstract reality of personal feelings and experiences emphasizing in fact the infinite faces of subjectivity in confrontation with the continuous provocations of existence. The result of this process was an overwhelming – through proportions and ideatic consistence - and significant suite of “faces-impresses” of humanity, as it is reflected in the being and conscience of the contemporary artist. A multiform portraitistic concept like a mosaic, in continuous transformation, extracted from the bottom of any reality, but wearing the surprising mark of the alienations suffered by humanity in days, in seasons, in ages, in epochs of existence. A mirror of all the beings with their wanderings and passions, with their faiths and prejudices, with their ardours and failures.
Thus Florica Prevenda composed a gigantic self-portrait of moods, infered from the fervour with which she imagined the expressive details, most of them being rendered with a force and eloquence of impressive symbols and significations, which facilitated the open dialogue with any type of spectator. The modernity of her means of expression does not impede at all communication, the ensemble of details reconstituting the “face devoured” by the rapacious eddies of existence. This is the ordeal that the artist takes upon herself while searching for her redemption. A ritual of “complete combustion” with daily cadence that she executes with the belief that this way the wounds will be cured like the cry alleviating the fears. It’s an exhibitional itinerary that imagines, in each archetypal ovoids without face, so many facets of this humanity in decadent decline, the updated and amplified image of Dantesque Inferno.
Florica Prevenda’s performance lies in the exercise of style and technical virtuosity tested in the long portrait series. In order to materialize this universe, so sensible and complex in its intimate articulations, the artist fully mobilized her imagination in an impetuous inventive verve, introducing in the plastic equation materials and structures of the most unforeseeable kind, some realized by the artist herself (nets of barbed wire, for example). The inclination to object-picture with obvious minimalist and poverist stresses doesn’t annul the demonstrations of a refined chromatic savour of her pictorial instinct. There are works that live eminently through the complementary relationship with the others, but many others have their own vibration and significant colourist density, which allows their extraction from the ensemble for exhibing them alone. This is the case in some demonstrative sequences presented in the exhibition from the museum. By this suite of portraits, Prevenda belongs to the family of great allegoric artists, creators of essential words who remain in our memory by their efforts of discoverers. They bluntly put us in front of the revealed reality no matter how cruel this reality might be, at the end of their own purifying experience. Their gesture has in the depth of the initial determination, the vehemence of expressionist contestations. That’s why Prevenda’s creations have both the acid bluntness of imprecations and the suave rustling of poetic reverie. In the revealed faces from her devouring artistic self coexist, in an harmony of irreconcilable contrasts, the implacable resurrection of light and of darkness joined in the destiny of humanity.