Marina Aristotel, Colour Splinters

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Marina Aristotel, Colour Splinters
Opening: Thursday, February 6th, 2020, 6.00 PM

Estopia Art Gallery Lugano is pleased to invite you on Thursday, February 6^th, 2020, at 6.00 PM, at the opening of the exhibition Colour Splinters, by Marina Aristotel. The exhibition is supported by HYT Watches, a Swiss innovative watch making house, that understand and valorize the use of liquids to instill the art of precise time-telling. Alongside HYT Watches, Les Ambassadeurs, the prestigious chain acting as the official distributors in Lugano.

After her successful first solo show, AASAMBLAJ, presented by Estopia Bucharest, in 2019, the young Romanian artist makes a step forward in experimenting with material fluidity and colour innovation. Trained as a painter and known previously mainly for her work with resin, in the past two years the artist has boldly explored beyond her own frame of reference with three-dimensional layering and assemblage technique.

With Colour Splinters, Marina Aristotel surprisingly includes a new media in her art practice – plexiglass – which she masterfully turns from rigid to fluid, while emphasizing its vivid transparencies and reflection properties. Cutting and reassembling remains her main focus, while the artist continues the same dialectic approach of firstly creating and then “destroying” her own work. For Marina Aristotel, cutting her painted surfaces is a must: only after this phase does the artist start to find the real “order” and “meaning” of her work. The roughness of splinters thusly come into play with harmony in hues of color palettes bridging together a complete sensorial experience, guiding the viewer on how shapes and colors can create causal patterns, also based on theories of colors, with thrilling aesthetic results.

Overlapping color dispositions à la Rothko, contrasting elements bring out the simplicity yet distinct commotion of colors resonating with emotion. This fracturing, shattering of shapes turns into an explosion of colour splinters that seem able to cut the view and reshape new forms and volumes, comparable to a glued together mosaic of thoughts and memories.

A simple yet elegant play on how splinters of reality and shattered elements can bring together an endless oscillation between the flow of time and complete stillness. As one of the promising and innovative young artists in Romania, Marina Aristotel uses different paints to accentuate the difference of colors through a liquid-like approach. Colour Splinters is, in this perspective, a manifesto for fluidity of both material and colour, where the artist builds, piece after piece, a mysterious, inner puzzle whose coherence the viewer is called to discover.

Curator: Edwin Hughes Scorretti

Born in 1985, Marina Aristotel lives and works in Bucharest.

She graduated in Painting from the National University of Arts, Bucharest, in 2015, and earned her MA in the same field in 2017. Trained as a painter, she oriented herself initially towards resin as main media, while experimenting with installation and other media and techniques. Further on she shaped her own technique, which combines painting, layering and assemblage, while focusing on abstraction as the means to express best her artistic vision. Estopia Art Gallery, Bucharest, presented her first solo show in 2019. She participated in several group shows such as, in Bucharest, Death, LaBorna Gallery; Diploma, Palatul Știrbei, and Atelier 19&34, Visual Arts Center; Spatial Activity Studio 9, a workshop held by prof. Slawomir Brzsoska and Rafal Gorczynski, Poznan University, UNA Galeria, in 2017; and An Abstract Feeling, 418 Gallery, Bucharest, 2016, among others.