Andreea Medar and Mălina Ionescu have been collaborating since 2017, and their shared projects
include land-art interventions, environment, performance, installations, digital media and social
artworks.
Their projects include NOW/NO (2019), Viae Ferrae (2019), Hypercube (2020), Hypercube II (2021), ViaeFerrae II (2021), 70 de pachete (2022), Livada Mare (2022), Breakfast (2023), Locus Florens (2023), Land Under Wave (2023).
An analysis of their artistic practice must necessarily focus on their individual projects as well as on how they converge and convey two different approaches in terms of motivation and premises.
I. ANDREEA MEDAR. MEMORIES FROM THE FUTURE
Andreea Medar creates objects and installations, land-art interventions, spaces and sculptures from unconventional materials, media and video installations, in projects such as Solarium – The Forever Garden, Leftovers from the Future, Breathing Plastic, Dowry, Chronophobia, Racoți, Maria.
From the idea, born in the garden of the grandparents, and exploited as a depository of traditions, to the mythical garden as a space of introspection, memory, the artist creates, in relation to the exhibition space, visual representations that belong to a utopian vegetal
world, “a spiritual garden adapted to the globalisation era”, as the artist states. Her works combine traditional techniques, related to fine and decorative arts (sewing),with media practices – live multiscreen transmissions (telepresence), using transparent plastic and smart
materials (fluorescent thread, pigments or UV reactive threads), light boxes, different sources of light, mixes and hybridises artistic genres in site-specific installations and media environments loaded with connotations related to local identity, philosophically existential in relation of consubstantiality with nature understood as environment and depository of individual/collective memory.
Dowry, Chronophobia, Racoți, Racoți the Book are projects through which the author connects to family history, communicates with her grandmother, seeks to discover the histories of the place, of the community in a recollection visualised through traditional artistic techniques and new media. Andreea Medar, in the Breathing plastic, 2021 and Solarium projects. The Forever Garden works with the space that it reconfigures through its interventions, turning it into a sitespecific- art-place. Installations that have become the environment, conquer and shape the space. The project develops as dioramas with extensive scenographies, in which the artist’s creativity generates a world of forms, a possible universe in which plastic becomes living matter. There is a unity full of naturalness, depth and freshness, between the concept, ideas, thoughts and the ways of artistic expression used by Andreea Medar in an artistic process whose visual speech, subject to the rigours of eternal beauty, is doubled by a strong mind capable of understanding and to reflect in original creations a world in continuous becoming.
II. MĂLINA IONESCU. A POETICS OF DWELLING
Mălina Ionescu is simultaneously interested in traditional media, in series like The Long Works, The Distance Between Home and Home, or Dulce Domum, and research as artistic practice in projects like Extant. The intimate space of the home, the silent witness of our existence, can be found in a series of works in which the artist extracts fragments from the immediate reality.
The images, traditional paintings, are invested with a touch of mystery that prompts us to see what we cannot comprehend and exists beyond, a state with which we empathise in front of the work Dulce Domum.
The dwelling dissected and illustrated through the archiving of documents, traces of our existence in the administrative mechanism, became for Mălina Ionescu the conceptual project The lost land, completed in works made in mixed technique. The works integrate acts, copies of conventional identity and different materialities in seemingly abstract formulas.
The artist uses the ways of artistic expression with the intention of creating sensory plastic structures. The distance between here and there, thought of as an effective road that connects a home-home route, from the works The long works, constitutes an effective path that we feel that it belongs to us and we belong to it. It is our temporal passage through the worlds that surround us in a daily life that we navigate physically and, at the same time, accompanied by the dreamscape of some mental projections – wishes, hopes, reveries. The project I dreamt of Giant Fish, Again, an environment multimedia, is conceived by Mălina Ionescu as an immersion in the world of the subconscious, a magical and unreal world that is part of us and that we experience with the same intensity as the real, the everyday. The imagery of recurring dreams, where worlds populated by oversized marine life coexist, immerses us in the virtuality of a human-nonhuman habitable space that we must accept and understand. Mălina Ionescu’s works are conceptual and at the same time charged with intense experiences and personal pictorial approaches in a creative, honest search to find the balance between the idea and the pulsating life of visual representations on concrete or ephemeral support.
II. ANDREEA MEDAR AND MĂLINA IONESCU
Now/No, Nedeie, 70 packs, Tiny planet, VIA FERRAE, HYPERCUBE are complex artistic projects, the results of a collaboration between Andreea Medar and Mălina Ionescu. A fertile dialogue based on original ideas and a deep, value-selective and ethical knowledge of contemporary artistic concepts and practices, generated a series of site-specific art installations in indoor/outdoor spaces and online. The two artists observe, archive, document reality and research the layers of meanings that make up the memory of the intimate/public space.
Each work becomes a visual construct, a decipherable metatext by recomposing a puzzle of essentialized and reconfigured fragments of reality. The projects, although they are different in theme, narrative, art form – from performance, installation to virtual environment – share an anthropological perspective in which the imprint of identity is discovered through the memory of the place, thought of as a continuum past-present-future.
In projects such as VIAE FERRAE I, II and III, Tiny Planet and Locus Florens, in a limited space the map of certain places is developed through referential visual signs with recollections of situations, sensations, in possible diaristic styles objectified in a subjective mapping. In the case of projects like Now/No, Nedeie, 70 packs, the open space, the natural environment becomes a working environment, a support with which the work interacts and coexists harmoniously. In the Nedeie project, the involvement of members of the local community transforms the event into a participatory performance, a new community cultural form of communication through art.
The conceptual and visual representation methods through which the two artists realized spatiality give the works, in the case of those placed in limited spaces, monumentality in detail and timeless depth, and in the case of those filmed with the drone, that familiar closeness, a transcendent embrace. The series of media projects HYPERCUBE has multiple existential connotations that define human beings in the digital age. We remember the pandemic and the physical communication restrictions that caused human interrelationship to move into the virtual space/ community. Telepresence places us here and there in a virtual existence, in a virtual world. We become virtual entities in a hyper-reality. Audience participation and the possibility to exist in real time in several spaces, thanks to live cameras, creates magic and the immersion of everyone, for a moment, in a metaphorical space of a post-human existence transforms the virtual environment into a source of meditation on the state of the human being today.
Translated by Patricia Măroiu
