Bloom
Artist: Ana Maria Micu
Curator: Diana Dochia
23.02.2006 – 23.03.2006
Opening: 23.02.2006 at 07:00 p.m.
A resuscitation guide for the after postmodernism female
About beauty, esthetic class? Not even close. Rather because of them. Because of modern esthetics, built on the rejection of beauty and, furthermore, even because of feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism and the new attitude concerning representation. For Ana Maria Micu observing is not the same with chewing together esthetics and social diagnosis she offers a lightly obsolescent selection, that lacks responsibility, which makes it even more interesting: she moves away from the context, the experience of immediate reality and decorates us with new preoccupations formulating an accurate, truth-like justification for beauty. A long-gone cause, recycled and reabused, that Ana Maria Micu delivers to us sophisticatedly wrapped, with the same joy that a housewife feels when she sticks in her market bag, together with the cauliflower and onions, a bottle of French perfume.
So the happy scissors of auto-irony are not blunt yet. The lady whose house burnt down while she was watching herself in the mirror gets from contemporary art a list of possible terrorists, while Ana already gives her a remodeling treatment. We are witnessing a simulacrum where hybrid women, that appear to be empty of speech, parade. The figurative nature of her works remains unaltered in its essence, as the only link that the artist is insinuating with contemporary ideologies (a link that also exists in her earlier works, inspired by the advertisement industry) has been abandoned: the characters perpetrate their exile in an impassable, alienated way, in a space that is not haunted by the shivers of the present.
Ana Maria is practicing a cosmeticised speech on the public image of womankind, not in the terms of sexual difference, but against tipification, supersaturation, an approach that is explainable by reference to the criticism and reorganization of public conventions and to the theme of fallen idols. There has been within her works and there still is an unobvious link with the speech, from which her images easily break free, according to the procedure of the automatic dictation: they don’t declare, of their own accord, their source, they don’t have predictable aspirations, in other words, they are not meant to exist in the context. To all this we are free to attach narration elements, starting from the substitution of reality, from exercising observation, from the various circumstances that pop up from the simple association of images or from whatever.
Daria D. Pervain, art critic