#2. DOING GOOD THINGS IN BAD PLACES Print

Painting is located in the center of my artistic interests, and through it I investigate concepts of time, memory, absence, waste, decay, violence, identity, subjectivity and vulnerability The purpose behind my latest artwork (painting-graphics, collage, assemblage) is to explore the expressive properties of paint and other materials through physical and poetic processes, following the development of a personal dialogue in between thoughts and colors, emotions and memories, lines and gestures, hesitations and decisions. Desiring to pull the viewer from representation, I like to draw attention to the painting process and to many painterly 'imperfections', which can be clearly visible in the works. My paintings are often built up in layers, during long periods of time, through a process of recording and analysing natural forms, shapes and objects which I make myself, or my own manipulated photographs. These visual sources often resonate with my old drawings and sketches, which are in turn incorporated in the future paintings. The brushwork experiments in the studio and the repetitive structural forms found in my environment become a language of my work. If I were to synthesize in a sole phrase what characterises my interventions, steps, installations and artworks of the media I have experimented so far (photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture), I would say that they are all somewhat self-referential. Self-referential in the sense that my work doesn't demonstrate nor does it present the functioning of structures belonging to the territory of the real. But rather it embraces these structures, interrogates them, in the pursue of a visual expression where reality and imaginary, conscience and unconscious, life and death stop being felt as incompatible. www.maiaoprea.ro/en http://maiastefanaoprea.wordpress.com