Glamour Objects

by Marilena Preda Sânc / catalog text for the "Structures in equilibrium" Solo Show / Palatele Brâncovenești Cultural Center

"Structures in Equilibrium", the exhibition visual artist Liliana Mercioiu Popa displays, ambients with drawings, collages, paintings and objects the mysterious and seducing, challenging and offering space the Cuhnia ("mediaeval kitchen") Gallery of the Brancovan Palaces Cultural Center presents.
A post-modern artist with a refined approach biased onto meditation and experiment, Liliana Mercioiu Popa appropriates various media, traditional and modern techniques in order to configurate her visual thinking space.
In this exhibition the artist invents certain simple shapes able to develop into more and more complex structures and into absurd, but possible geometries - see the glamour objects that appeal and intrigue us, yet requiring our interpretation. We perceive synaesthetically, even empathically, a large range of mental, visual and tactile sensations, in order to finally understand a hermetical demarche opened to the space beyond image, beyond picture framing - we are speaking about the mental space projected into the other one, about the space as a continuous universe. An empirical geometry turns into a creative, gradually
conscious process, generating lines able to build spaces within spaces or just become solitary presences in the monochromatic fields augmenting static, either serene or tense worlds.
The conceptual demarche is read starting from sketches of ideas which, turned into drawings and abstract collages, are further projected into large-scale paintings, i.e. into images where the three-dimensional objects inhabit a metaphysical space that is going to be naturally translated into the real world.
The paintings "live" through their colour surfaces - austere and sensible monodies in which an atemporal enciphered construct, perceived as a mandala, is articulated.
The objects must be studied and accepted, in their ambiguous existence, from the perspective of a relational aesthetics opened to the durable and the ephemeral, yet positioned as obvious probabilities. The floating installation completes the atmosphere and brings us closer to the mental-imaginary objects acquired by the visual artist Liliana Mercioiu Popa.
We are absorbed in the dimensions of a concrete-art space: a beneficial oasis for the spirit, achaste place where we could find the joy of contemplation.