Emanuela Harris Santamarian – PANTA REI

Dan Nica – FRAGMENTARIUM

19 iulie-5 august, 2016

Emanuela Harris Santamarian / Panta Rei

“Everything is in motion, Every Object is Modified by One’s Look” – a colloquial paraphrasing of Heisenberg–is a new body of works in which I translate and turn the external world inside out, reducing it to colorful vortexes of familiar yet fictitious forms and structures. Its main idea is based on a facet of modern physics which states that everything that seems solid is really comprised of energy, and that molecules in motion are subject to human intervention.

I began this series of large scale drawings on paper, after several months of confinement following a ligaments transplant surgery and living vicariously through my friends’ stories. During that time, I grew more curious about the mechanics of motion and its possible visual translation as well as how memory relates to perception. In physics, motion is described as any change in position or place. Thus, my exploration gravitate towards how much can be conveyed emotionally and conceptually within a physically static support (the paper). I realized I am rather interested in pushing the limits of abstraction and suggesting emotional, and physical motion in an immediate, visceral manner than in offering a clear narrative.

I’ve started to think of memory as a selective amnesia guided by the changes within us. The methodological process of memory in finding personal relationship to the past is similar to the one of archeology. “Excavation”, in which space and time are mapped and unearthed, has emotional content based on extrapolation from what we have not found rather that what we have found. The missing or incomplete parts of our memories, comprise the chasm to be filled with new, fluid stories, which do not necessarily reconcile the linear narrative of the initial story.

This project keeps evolving and changing due to the nature of research ever so expanding as well as my working method, which is fueled by improvisation, intuition and accidents which are then turned into events.  As an artist, I am interested in choices: what remains to be seen, what is absent and how decisions are made. I want to reevaluate the algorithms existing in a drawing and the parameters of possibilities for changes from one drawing to the next without disruptions in the meaning or visual redundancy.  I incorporate in my visual lexicon, elements which either borrow directly from or reference Eastern European folklore, Constructivism, architectural diagrams and color theory charts.

Within those new works, I explore not only space and its division, but also the fluidity and tension of contradictions: organized chaos and uncontrolled order, machine-like generated image and imperfections, fictitious and concrete, recognizable/known and suggested. I also connect the dichotomies intrinsic to motion (past-present/past-future; transfer vs. change; progress vs. regress; action vs. reaction), with memory and perception: how do we remember stories/information, and how do we retell the stories or make associations between the pieces of information which we posses. In doing so, my aim is to map an articulated visual system of understanding the movement between memory and a posteriori experiences.

Dan Nica / Fragmentarium

Fascinația pe care o degajă vechile fonturi tipografice este, pentru privitorul de astăzi, neschimbată și probabil identică cu uimirea pe care a adus-o invenția tiparului. Această extensie a omului ce se prezintă ca o imagine a preciziei repetate, a inspirat forme complet noi de extindere a energiilor sociale. Deși dispărut astăzi, datorită inovațiilor tehnice aduse de către computer, tiparul  pare să își continue povestea sa pe volumul sculptural, conferind acestuia un aspect tactil, epidermic, o patină a timpului, înnobilândul.

Stilul de literă al titlurilor de ziar și al publicațiilor actuale din media, tinde sa dea literelor o formă aproape iconică, o formă apropiată de rezonanță auditivă, așa cum este apropiată și de calitatea sculpturală. Temele pe care le abordez  în sculptura mea pleacă de la caracterul tipărit, privit ca textură  și în același  timp ca element principal, ca centru de interes al lucrărilor. Pe parcursul timpului au apărut în sculptură și alte elemente: chei, încuietori, elemente și patternuri decorative, care prin fragmentare și recompunere, creează mereu obiecte noi, dar în același timp, surprinzător, păstrează un caracter de vechi  și  atemporal.

Emanuela Harris Santamarian „PANTA REI”,  Dan Nica „FRAGMENTARIUM” @ Art Yourself Gallery, București 

Art Yourself Gallery – Bd. Dacia 51, etaj 1/[email protected]  / www.artyourselfgallery.ro / 021 222 98 77