7 Terraces Opened to the World

 by Ileana Pintilie Teleaga / catalogue text for the Group Exhibition / Sanaa - Zollverein Kubus, Essen (Germany), 2010

Liliana Mercioiu Popa made her debut and has become known to the public through a conceptual art that uses the hidden meanings of words, investigating both the relationship between these meanings and a certain plastic sensoriality feeling always connected to it. The objects, paintings or photographs taken during that period are related to one another betraying a ludic spirit, open to explore certain artistic areas less researched by others, looking for the hidden meanings of words.

This spirit is found also in the works displayed in her first larger scale personal exhibit called Vieţuiri (Instances of Life), in which, after some evolutions toward the informal art, returns to the figurative painting. A vague theme that of commons facts, from daily life, is felted in the series of connected works due to a smooth narrative spirit. The main meaning is the one of authenticity, and the characters are selected from the persons close to her or discovered by chance and taken by surprise performing some daily life activities. These characters have nothing ostentatious and they still awake her interest through their unusual authenticity.

In fact, together with close or common characters, Liliana Mercioiu Popa follows a pathway inside her being, of searching and recapturing personal "states" - fragmented, repetitive - that transpose a certain "excess", discovered as an escaping gate away from the tensions created around concepts as if she is the one that has to choose between their truths and the "simple joys" in life. Choosing the later, the artist pleads for "sinking" into sensoriality for a get away from the life's overwhelming realm in front of the severe philosophical problems. Even if the novelty of these figurative representations is astonishing, the pictorial means bear a personal label, being already known; in this new series of works we are recapturing the energic line, almost gestural, from her subsequent paintings. The pallete is reduced to fine colors of gray, amplified by short chromatic vivid bursts of color.

Therefore, the plastic gestural language is the unifying element of her different stylistic quests, the one that leads her toward a "pure painting", represented by both chromatic exploitations and textures, surfaces full of color covered by a wax layer. These works, sprung out of different art plastic experiments, are transformed into a dense substance or a more transparent one with an object structure. Her last exhibit project, Despre fluiditate (About Fluidity) proposes eventually an elegant speech about the interchange between opaque surfaces, of a dense substance, in a slow flow, and the transparent ones, easy, stating a happy reunion of the two worlds, created with the whole honesty as a result of some complex research processes.

In the end, no matter what the subject chosen is, in the eyes of the artist the painting continues to represent a field of pure visual research. In this field she makes a selection clearing up a possible path, opened as a temporary escapade into the "human depths" of the world, an invitation into an existential and plastic quest at the same time.

Ileana Pintilie, 2010