An existential crossroad, a re-location and a new life, rebuilt seven years ago, define the exhibition signed by Ana Maria Micu, Left Hand To Distant View.
In the museum space, where she works site specific, one discovers an entire universe, built step by step, with great discipline, by the hands of an attentive and courageous artist, according to a list of very accurately defined basic needs.
The working process is subsidiary to introspection and analysis and aims to create a seemingly impenetrable habitat, like a protective womb, rounded into successive layers of memory and translucent images; from this space, roots of a new world are sprouting, expanding the body of work.
Without necessarily being a heroic, lonely male figure or a domineering, distant, admirable female figure, the solitary human, with or without gender inflection, is a mixture of power and vulnerability, a silhouette forever profiled, in a continuous dialogue with its shadow. To the list of needs for her artistic survival, Ana Maria Micu has added, at least for a while, the appeal to solitude as an act of self-discovery.
Self-imposed or socially normalized isolation in the pandemic enhances this more or less desired dialogue with the self. It is often in solitude that tertiary elements appear—and their role increases in importance, becoming an active part of daily exploration. Ana brings them into her painting and makes them an integral part of her life. From the many objects necessary for studio work to clothes, cushions, lifeless objects without personality, almost everything that fills the emptiness of a house, and even plants—all this inventory receives the same dose of respect and attention from the artist-observer, and the layers of reality are superimposed or aligned in full accordance with their growth.
The artist uses time in all its assigned meanings: from calculating and carrying out the process of work through study, to observation, translating reality into a drawn, painted or animated image, waiting, meditation, observation anew, inner criticism, correction, training attention, returning to the beginning of the experience through distancing, questioning this reality and finally renouncing any kind of intervention.
Her main fear is related to the sharpening of her own perception in the midst of introspection and the way she positions herself, willingly and by necessity, in the centre of this world circumscribed by a studio and, in particular, of how her own figure can be perceived in its fullness, polyvalence and uniqueness.
The self-portrait opens up several themes for discussion and brings the viewer closer to the creator of the scenes with which they enter into dialogue, revealing the mystery of a hitherto unknown identity. The exercise of formally analyzing oneself in the mirror, while learning to study by nature, remains, for many artists, a constant exercise of self-assessment throughout life, of repeating the dialogue mentioned above, of retracing a transition from one stage to another or of returning to the source of the signal after the exercise of exploring otherness.
In Ana’s case, the self-portrait is a complement to the surrounding nature. She is portrayed, gently and modestly, as the host gardener, the caretaker of all the elements that articulate this habitat—the house, the studio, the construction site and the exhibition. It is as if she takes each viewer by the arm and meticulously tells them everything she sees, while she works, thinks, looks out of the window, plans or dreams. The paradox is that, although we would expect the figure of the artist to reign histrionically in a sought-after chaos, in her case she becomes a secondary, companionable element, seated on the right seat, in which the lead is the environment, the garden, the air, the context. Although they do not bear the hallmarks of a live broadcast, the images created bear the imprint of their own time, not necessarily of their own geography, which they translate into the universal.
Ana Maria Micu (b. 1979, Dorohoi) lives and works in Botosani. She graduated in Painting from the University of Arts and Design Cluj-Napoca in 2002 and has a Master in Visual Arts since 2004. She works with Mind Set Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan, where she exhibits constantly, both solo and in various groups.
