Gallery RIMA

At the beginning of her postgraduate studies already, the young artist decided to channel her creative energy not by the existing painterly vehicles, but she began to look beyond the borders of traditional artistic disciplines and their media. In her search for the true method to objectify her vision, Andrea found her own matter, technology and procedure, playing spontaneously and freely in the space that separates and connects the painting/drawing and the sculpture/relief. Those were the conditions for the creation of her works on paper that discarded the basic postulates of the drawing – where not only nothing had been drawn, but there were no traces of a draughtsman’s process or tools. Even the concept of “works on paper” is fully conditional since paper is only the departure point in the creation of a different support. In certain groups of works from the cycles of Between Hope and Hopelessness (2004-2005) and Hammered Philosophy (2005-2006) Andrea’s foundation was not the drawing paper but the moistened and semi-decomposed paper with which she would create, in layers specifically dried up, the support not particularly thick but exceptionally firm. Such base, but also others, much more fragile, become the carriers of emphasised physical actions produced with non-painterly means – by hammering (Hammered Philosophy), by piercing and scratching (Sacrifice, Rebel), by burning and combustion (Combustion). In the years that followed, in her cycle Perfecting the Skill of Existence (2008-2010) the artist improved her creative process with the application of similar technologies and procedures on big canvases, producing hybrid paintings-objects. Their skeleton was made up of the skeleton frame and the position from which they communicate with the artist and the public is frontal just as with any other painting. However, by the specific quality of their genesis (use of non-painterly materials and procedures), by the accentuated structure of the matter and the suggested third dimension (thickness of 6 to 10 cm) these works leave the discourse of painting and impose their objectness.

The cycles of works on paper such as Hammered Philosophy and paintings-objects such as Perfecting the Skill of Existence belong to a common phase, and one could also say the first phase of Andrea’s work where one can easily recognise two dominant creative processes. One of them is the process of creation: an artwork is the result of artistic performance. The idea or the state as the content of the work is objectified with artist’s action. The other principle refers to the work as an artistic object – it is not only the result of performance but has been predestined to be a trace of a concept and artistic experience. The group of works on paper Hammered Philosophy and the group of paintings-objects collectively titled Love Your Destiny (each of the three works includes a distinctive idea: “Breath”, “Blood Circulation” and “Cosmos”) were created by the action capturing all of Andrea’s concentration, the basic form in which the artist reveals the state she is in. Repetitive forceful blows with a hammer on the paper (Hammered Philosophy) or tranquil and concentrated piercings that break through the fibre of the support (Love your Destiny) – these gestures represent the basic expressions of Andrea’s existential moment. The leading role of that action (non-aesthetic and non-painterly in character) is to introduce the performative dimension in Andrea’s art. She personally does not hide her inclination towards performance, from Joseph Beuys to Marina Abramović, because it equates art and life. Hammered Philosophy is an imprint of raw life energy, manifested unbearably and unrestrainedly in the blows. Instead of looking for verbal and visual forms that close her up into abstract semantic frames, Andrea wants her personal contemplative nature to leave a physical trace and bring about real change in her existence. She wants the idea to make the blow; the hole and the scratching to leave a real trace in the sensitive space, and not just a metaphor. She wants those philosophic principles to come down from the theoretic cloud and begin to live irrevocably. Paper placed on concrete support which the artist hits with her blows is the test tape that records her concentrated rebellious energy; with its cuts, scratchings and holes, the action writes the ultimatum of existence. The painting-object Love Your Destiny – Breath (although the two other works from the same group can also be quoted as examples) is very similar to previous works visually (the support pierced with little wholes over the entire surface) and also conceptually: the creative procedure is processed as action experienced as sensation. Nevertheless, this work carries a totally opposite energy – stable, channelled and enlightened. The artist slowly, and in sessions, pierces holes in the support. The repetition of the same procedure where her entire concentration is gathered into several simple gestures introduces the state of meditation, the awareness of one’s own breathing (Breath) and heart beats (Blood Circulation) – her own presence (Cosmos) this process transforms the work of art into a meditative refuge, a space of self-revelation, just as Marina Abramović achieves the same with her performance Counting the Rice. The works Love Your Destiny indicate transposition from the extrovert, brutal and rebellious energy, a metaphor for the principle of action, effect and movement  (in Hammered Philosophy) – into a slowed down state of non-action where one simply “observes oneself existing”. The title of the entire cycle Perfecting the Skill of Existence indicates the loss of man’s touch with selfhood. In the whirlpool of permanent operation, between the automatic everyday activities and the conscious fulfilment of planned ambitions, between the imperative of continuous movement through time and space, but also of all-encompassing virtual life – man’s awareness of personal existence and presence is delayed, frequently and unfortunately also cancelled. In Andrea’s case, art is a meditative process – it is the skill the artist applies to cease, to abandon the cloak of time-speed-engagement and remain denuded in front of herself. Sometimes it seems that the complex creative procedure is subconsciously initiated by Andrea’s deep need to last, for a long and slow process that gives her enough time and reason to leave the everyday and sink again into her own self. Therefore, the three works Love Your Destiny are in fact visual manifests of the meditative role of art in Andrea’s creative activity.

The process of creating an artwork, as we have seen, is primarily an experience and only consequently a realisation. Still, in her works on paper such as the Sacrifice (2005), Rebel (2005-2006) or Combustion (2005-2006) and particularly in the paintings-objects such as Simulacrum (2008-2010) and Shaman (2008-2010) that process is profoundly linked to the artist’s handling of natural materials. Andrea uses the matter as the fibre in which she can leave a trace and experience of action – she realises an artwork as the imprint of her idea in natural matter. In the complex application of natural materials (wood, paper, cotton), elements of nature (water, fire and air) and natural processes (moistening, drying, combustion, decomposition) there is a difference between the making of the base and its “disintegration”. The relationship between the base and the trace, characteristic of the classical medium of painting, is essentially changed because the trance is not felt, but imprinted on the surface of the support, thus becoming the cause of its internal structural transformation. Made from natural material, the support behaves like a living matter and not only does it reveal its resistance but also its reaction to Andrea’s gestures – blows, piercing, cutting, combustion. In the end, there is a work of art as a specific scar fibre. The scar, the word the artist uses gladly, is not understood as a consequence of a painful experience, only as her seemingly aggressive gestures and are not preconceived injuries. It is the objectness of the artist’s thinking about existence and her procedure with which she re-invents life itself. Good examples are works on paper entitled Sacrifice and in its wake Andrea made the painting-object Shaman. The essence of these works, with brutally scratched support in various directions, contains Andrea’s thinking about the phenomenon of sacrifice as an aspect of the most profound transformation in man’s life. The visual instigator of this contemplative preoccupation was a much used kitchen cutting board which had changed its form and colour because of numerous cuttings, blows, animal and plant juices it was soaked in for years. Meat was butchered on that old piece of wood, family meals and feasts were prepared on it and always linked in pagan religions with the ritual sacrifice of animals or vegetables. A sacrifice always assumes suffering as a guarantee for the transformation of bad into good, of a difficult state into good fortune, loss into gain, error into redemption. In religion – sacrifice is the belief in practice and finally it leads to the highest form of transformation – into life after death. The sacrifice of God-the Son by God-the Father, the sacrifice Christ suffered is the central event in Christian history – bringing redemption and eternal life to the entire humankind. However, the sacrifice in Andrea’s perspective is equal to the one in the life of any ordinary man – a continuous deduction of a lesser or greater part of selfhood in order to bring betterment to others. Mechanical scratchings in the support of Sacrifice or the one created by controlled burning of the matter in Shaman are places where deconstruction if transformed into creation, where the base is transformed into a work of art. The sacrifice of stability, harmony or wholeness is the path towards maturing, and the scar made in the process of that self-destruction is the place where identity is born – either as an authentic part of art or of human personality.
(Complete text in printed edition)