Timisoara of the Young Artists

 by Coriolan Babeti /Album text for "Timisoara of the Young Artists" / Interart Triade Foundation, 2012

Judging by the number of followers, but, more conspicuously, judging by the number of disciples who overinterpreted their teacher's lesson, we can talk about post-Flondorism in Timişoara. The result of the master's work is tangible today, after the consecration of many young artists who are not necessarily like their teacher, but who were trained to work in the spirit of his ideas and suggestions.

Flondor's divergent experimentalism has been adhered to by Liliana Mercioiu in her studio. The echoes of the Sigma group, canvases painted in an abstract-geometrical manner, conceptualist tendencies meet the graphic lyricism of the painting, the random line, a blurred effect, looking for an intuition, without necessarily finding it. The artist treads on the same path of "opening" her studio, its entire perimeter, making sure that, among many (derived) complications, there is a personal storage of freedom of choice in the nearer or more remote future. Small ages, short stages, most of them well accomplished, grouped in cycles of artworks with a rich potential, often achieved, make the highly prolific artist worthy of attention, a case I would place at the very heart of the youth movement.

For her, painting is, more often than not, a cumulus, whose vapors often shape a figure, an idea, or an intention on the canvas. On other occasions, her work is an accumulation of glacis which, technically speaking, circumscribe the very notion of quest. Most frequently, she focuses on experimentation, transcribed, in painting, by means of random gestualism, which tests the limits of imagery. In painting, as well as in many of her drawings, the signs seem to levitate on the ineffable page... Here, like in other studios, we are confronted with the theme of Isis' veil, the coat of a hymen dissolving the contours of shapes and brings the vagueness of suggestion onto the canvas, accompanied by the breath of poetry, the game and the expressive function of evanescence.

The artist's feminine sensitivity is often combined with a certain virility of the image. The dominating chromatic elements are the shades of coloured grey. Many of her artworks seem to be skylights - cut into the roof of the imaginary studio, windows opening onto the light of the sky, where pure colour never appears, not even by accident...

There is an array of passages from wakefulness to dream, from tangible reality evaporating and allowing itself to be converted into reverie. The terrestrial dimension of some landscapes grows more aerial with the gesture that moves the paintbrush... For example, the surface of a canvas - which I picked randomly - is inhabited by a cardiogram-seismogram: "It is the spiral of the DNA profile", the artist explains. What remains from this difference of perception is the very ambiguity which the artist always relies on, as the main instrument of poeticity. ...

The huge imaginary museum of the iconography of the invisible in natural sciences, extended from microbiology to macrocosm, radically changed the position occupied by the aniconism of abstract art in a period dominated by someone like Greenberg (the 1950s-the 1970s). Although the abstract informal vision proposed, for instance, by the New York School has (in theory) made a point of excluding the representation of the object, it has become, paradoxically, a representation of the "elementary structure" of the matter, "more real than the reality" of the object which vanishes from the artist's priorities.

Perhaps this is why the abstract forms grow, as it happens in Liliana Mercioiu's studio, into what seems, in the abstract-oriented gestualism, more like a confession of Psyche, a description of herself, the autograph of the creative Self.