The area of Elena’s creation that covers performance in particular and movement in general is the artist’s curiosity to get to know different facets of the surrounding reality, through the body and the kinesthetic capacities of the body.
This curiosity, takes the form of projects in which the artist, through an often frustrated, authentic, provocative communication, surprises the other (the neighbor, the fellow man, the spectator) and takes him out of his comfort zone, makes him a co-creator for the moment, including him in the performance, and this because the artist learns about limits together with those with whom or for whom she performs, in a subtle game between controlling and letting something new appear constantly.
Out of the impulse to be open to the other, Elena’s practice could be described as frustrated, challenging boundaries or learning about them as if she had previously tabula rasa. This kind of naïve, informal but explosive energy, which she describes as telluric, can be histrionics or even exhibitionism, but an exhibitionism present to ask questions about reality, and the ways in which reality is framed. The frankness of Elena’s performances is opposed to the irony that you might perceive if you overinterpret, mockery is something to avoid. When working with situations, with her own or other performers’ bodies, Elena seeks the unmediated, unframable, totally authentic, totally present experience, in a revisionist way closer to the notion of happening.
“My project which is called Neted, an atypical project in which I invited as many “spectators” as possible to get involved, who in fact, over time became co-authors and who did not know each other. For a year I communicated remotely with these people, without seeing each other, only by phone and messages, and the convention was to perform something they couldn’t do, to dance in a space, to dance in a space, to walk in the park at a certain time, to move in a way they couldn’t, to film, to undress, to dress, whatever they dreamed, or wanted, that I would perform on their behalf. But their names remained anonymous. There was something the person couldn’t or didn’t know how to do. What you don’t know in your own body you don’t know anywhere. Basically my body became a remote field of knowledge for each participant.
The moment you get involved, in a situation of movement, you get to know directly, but you also distance yourself from the rest of the world. A beneficial isolation where you totally immerse yourself in bodily, emotional, cognitive experience. I recognize myself as much in the desire to monopolize, to embrace, to invade as in the desire to know through love, what I encounter”.
Text by Bogdan Bălean in conversation with Elena Copuzeanu
VISUAL ART / PAINTING / DRAWING
We can see the artist’s large-scale canvases and drawings as a conscious demonstration of control of attitudes and impulses, that could at any time digress and erupt explosively. Elena’s painting is at the same time a luxuriance of shades of gray, a dive into the vegetal, a plunge into an aquatic – neurotic, in which maintaining balance is achieved through well-mastered calligraphy. Repetitive, compulsive affects, emerge from a mechanical nature into a biological one, rumination leads to a fluent thinking, only not in a linear time, but in a simultaneity of graphic flows directly connected to the psyche, to what the artist has could – only she – access.
Her drawings and paintings are based on the broad, wide gesture. These gestural works are composed of black on white and can immediately make you think of Japanese calligraphy, transfigured into a brutal, authentical, existential gesturalism. Her drawings are actually the experience of voluptuousness that occurs between the author and the object she touches, the feedback, the vibration, the resonance she has, in her fingers, hands and body, touching the material: the white paper and the intense black color. The concept is not the starting point, but the immediate relationship between the artist and the object worked, with the help of soft charcoal that nourishes the sensory.
“I liked to generate a sum of all graphic signs – which I can sometimes also relate to Japanese calligraphy where everything is concentrated, at the point where the tip of the brush touches the paper. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a kind of real time composition – based on the response from the ‘’work body-object’’ that I can have as soon as I start working. Like a free flow writing/painting/drawing where your hand takes you into direct, intimate contact with the work surface. I challenged myself to take each gesture seriously. And to be aware and present in every millimeter of graphic sign, which I leave on the drawn or painted material. Crafting involves the hands. You return to the miniaturist who identifies himself with the gesture he is making. It’s a permanent touch. What I do, paradoxically, has turned into the work of a miniaturist, who needs to work Sisyphically, on a very, very large surface. So, I wanted to be able to concentrate on each line, each sign, no matter how big or, on the contrary, how infinitesimal it might be, I used my patience intensely, for days on end, in my studio, ‘patience’ a notion on that many religions build their practices. I set out to decorate the objects with the same kind of detail as in the drawings, creating an apparent chaos but also a pattern through which I can control and order this chaos. An energy and graphic eruption that is completely in control of my gesture.
It will be something dodecaphonic, disharmonic, offering and visually exciting, in the sense in which this graphics will want to catch you in a permanent effort of decoding, deciphering and unravelling the graphic threads”.
Text by Bogdan Bălean – critic and art historian – in conversation with Elena Copuzeanu
TEXTILE AND CERAMIC PAINTING
The clothes made by Elena, could be compared to ceremonial costumes or ritual garments. The textile painting of his clothes is therefore under the sign of an imagery that can invoke an ancient rite, a pagan ceremonial. In her textile paintings, we observe many small objects, characters and situations, linked together like a neural tissue, or like dozens of capillaries, or like some vegetable tissues that invade the surface, in a permanent trembling, and a permanent expansion, just as an hard-working anthill. These invasive drawings, we can rather call them situations of calligraphic movements, bear the imprints of an alert, sensitive psyche, continuously overflowing over the various textures.
On textiles or even on ceramics, one escapes from rumination and reaches forms that are reconstructed on new surfaces, far from the nerve.
The reality of the painting in white, gray and black, comes from a calligraphy mania specific to the artist’s creative act and composed, from infinite dots and tangles, people, animals, gases, plants, abstractions, between precision and unchaining, enfranchising, between the seriousness of the gesture – a seriousness offered and assumed like that of the gesture of the cross – and the moment of sardonic self-indulgence as a formula of humor. Strutting figures, coagulated in a frenetic, vertiginous handwriting, which take you a bit for fun, but without tiring you, naughty but also with common sense, occupy the chosen material, be it ceramic, textile or painting. Sometimes even her own body.
Text by Bogdan Bălean – critic and art historian
