Estopia Art Gallery, Bucharest, is pleased to invite you on Friday, November 27, from 2.00 to 8.00 PM, at the opening of the exhibition Not Natural, by Andrada Feșnic. Nearly two years after the artist’s first solo @ Estopia, which coincided then with the opening of the gallery, Andrada Feșnic returns to Bucharest with a new series of works completed entirely this year.
Not Natural is an irresistible serious game on the mind’s chess board: every work in this series represents a fabulous negotiation ground between what “it is” and what “could be”, and Andrada’s bet is to thin out almost completely the frontiers between the various potentialities of “reality”. Like an experienced diver, the artist convinces the viewer to plunge together in an aquarium – like world, peopled with luxurious creatures and plants, all touched by a seductive fluidity and need of transparency. Forms and characters in Andrada Feșnic’s paintings seem devoured by a hunger of metamorphosis, they belong simultaneously to multiple stories cut out from different slices of life and unfolded in the same unique plan of the canvas and in the same time – that of the present of memory.
In Andrada’s paintings, the world has a different logic and different levels of visibility: and the key character, who makes possible the simultaneous coexistence of these overlapped worlds, the only able to unwrap the layers of reality and settle them down in a narrative thread is the viewer. His or her mind is the real playing field here and the artist’s ultimate challenge. “I don’t intend to describe parts of nature or objects, says Andrada, but to compose an artificially plausible world, an interactive puzzle, from where some pieces are deliberately missing. I provoke the viewer to complete their absence by means of his or her imagination, memory and reason. The human eye, as we know, cannot focus on multiple elements at the same time: with this in mind, I combine elements that usually are not represented together, sometimes I amplify them in terms of size and chromatic, because what I want is to change the narrative perspective and bring it to a not natural zone”. No, it is not a comfort zone the world portrayed in Andrada Fesnic’s works, and no, it is not natural in the sense that it is not the world-as-we-know-it: rather, it is a “scenography of imagination”, as she defines it. Arrived by chance, like Alice in Wonderland, in the rabbit’s hole, the viewer has one chance: that of adapting his or her view to the new “lighting conditions” and start to see. Only then he or she will start to decipher, like Max Blecher in his famous novel, the unheard-of adventures in immediate reality.
Andrada Feșnic was born in 1987 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she lives and works.
She studied Painting at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she earned her BA in 2016 and her MA in 2018. In 2015 she won an Erasmus mobility at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. The A+ Project Space housed the artist’s solo exhibition Aftermath in 2018, at Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca. She presented her works in a series of group shows and international projects, including a performance as part of the project Performing the Unconscious, Freud Museum, London, in 2015. In 2019 she presented her first solo show, Fractured Realities, with Estopia Art Gallery in Bucharest, followed by Fractured Realities II at Estopia Lugano. For Andrada Feșnic, painting is a true experimental field defined by the overlapping of layers, the collage painterly effect and the carefully orchestrated decomposition of figurative elements.
Andrada Feșnic
Not Natural
November 27, 2020 – January 30, 2021
Opening: Friday, November 27, from 2.00 to 8.00 PM
Curator: Irina Ungureanu
Estopia Art Gallery, 5 Bocsa Street, sector 2, Bucharest
E-mail: office@estopiaartgallery.com
www.estopiaartgallery.com