Codruța Cernea

There is a play of texture, brushstroke, and colour in Codruța Cernea's painting, distinct, yet forever feeding into the core of her oeuvre. There is conscious continuity in each of her series, inextricably linked to an overlapping of the personal and artistic realms: Together Alone (evoking an event from the intimacies of couple-life through soft layers of colour), Float, Glide, Fly (an exercise into self-discipline through stark and linear chromatic contrasts) and Future Nostalgia (synthetizing both, yet extending into more complex compositions). Codruța Cernea retains this intention of greater compositional complexity for her work to come, hoping to imbue an aesthetic of meditative order with the same aura of enigma and reverie present in her current pictorial exploration.

Codruta’s practice is motivated by contemporary questions about the cultural development of concepts such as scenic nature, environmental and bio-engineering policy, democracy, carbon capitalism and the meaning of happiness. Her intergalactic voyagers become the benevolent builders of monuments for terrestrial beauty, which turn into subjects of this possible resolution’s aesthetic experiences. ”Future Nostalgia” subverts the dominant individualist ethos and avoids regressive nationalist pathos. The future we are proposed to be reflectively nostalgic about is the one in whose space one can contemplate a present we still have the option to change.