The result is colorful, fluid, baroque forms evoking nature, rivers or clouds, waves, undergrowth, organic structures and rhizomes. (...)
The observation is prolonged, the evocation of this real or fairy world becomes embroiled. The painting becomes autonomous. Lines and surfaces create abstract and broken, non-naturalistic spaces. It becomes ambiguous, gentle and violent, sensitive though insecure.
Magda Amarioarei is full of questions. She speaks, she writes without naming painting. She talks about what painting says or should say.
She opens and spreads her toolbox of the moment, come out words, names, objects: symbol, memory, Mircea Eliade, archetype, some brushes, Gaston Bachelard, mythology, reverie, tubes of oil paint, Carl Gustav Jung, metamorphosis, aerosol paint, alchemy, cosmicity, capitalist mechanics, canvas and stretchers, interiority, turpentine, resistance, alienation ...
These, however, offend the integrity of the artist; she rears at this negation of a quest for meaning that haunts her awakening as well as her sleep.
The painting questions her. She would like to answer it with words, to connect the verb, but she recognizes it: this link generates more unknown than known. Here, the painting would be a vampire from the Carpathian, nourished by the blood of this stranger who resists it, vampire then laughing at this artist impotent to name her discomfort. She assumes it, wanting to enjoy her intelligence has a price. As she knows, this greedy paradox, this seeming incompatibility of modes of perception and representation is, by their dynamics, the guarantors of a fullness.
In “The Book to Come”, Maurice Blanchot writes: The intelligence is interested in everything: the worlds, the arts, civilizations, drafts and achievements, everythingmatters to it and everything belongs to it. It is the universal interest that includes everything passionately, everything in relation to everything.
1
When this intelligence has done its work, it nevertheless refers, for whom it seems necessary, to a silent question which is answered only in the act. An open and simple question, at least in appearance, a question that arises between choice of color, between choice of opacity or transparency, form or blur, to appear or abstract, to do or not to do. At the risk of being lost, these choices will be followed by a succession of acts that are as obvious and real as they are intuitive and rebellious to any justification. Painting, a modest weapon, even ridiculous, becomes the challenge that re-actualizes our interiority in the world as it is today. An apparently futile weapon, but having the faculty of awakening the timeless great myths that cross the conscience or the human soul. (...)
She advances, however, at subdued pace, presenting us apparently inoffensive paintings. But just tamed, here we are faced with a rebel artist, as fragile as it is ambitious, giving herself the mission to recover our lost integrity and defeat all the old and new forms of alienation and self-dispossession, nothing less than that.
I go back to her paintings, titles surge: “Ancestors children”, “Roots”. Titles often memorial.
I ask, she answers. Her personal roots have certainly become exodus and travels (...) but if this term of root returns with insistence, it is to cover then to reveal a reality much larger than a touching autobiographical allusion, it is to tend towards a reality of a world to reclaim, that of our inner roots.
The exhibitions “EcoBiography” is not satisfied with a psychological biography, personal and sometimes immodest. The subject goes beyond the pathological of the image to reach the elements in their dreamlike depth. Movement where the being is projected in the becoming and the metamorphosis of the interior space towards the nature, offering a real confrontation and experience of oneself with the environments, with the elements.
1 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, Collection Folio essais (n° 48), Éd. Gallimard. 1ère Éd. 1959.
2 La Vie rêvée de Gaston Bachelard, Les Chemins de la Philosophie, France Culture, 9/9/2015.
André Delalleau , december 2017
Text written on the occasion of the exhibition “Eco-biography” organized by ESAVL, Royal Academy of the City of Liege