No. 26 / April 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Tribuna magazine, no. 413 / 2019
The road to making an artwork is as important as the final result for Alina Codin. This means that, before anything else, the artist does not use recipes or algorithms in her work, but also that between her life and her creation there is a total continuity.
Creative from project to project and even more, from artwork to artwork, the artist logically starts from painting and heads towards object, collage, sometimes décollage, but also Action Painting or Performance. Operating with ready made, found objects, simple, humble materials, Alina Codin also have ties with Arte Povera and Appropriation Art. Beyond all these and generally, all possible label, her biggest stake remains the image itself, whose story, morphology and idea is a nonverbal artistic message.

The title of her personal exhibition from 2019, Alive, which can also be read, as the poster suggests, A Live, catches the essence of the project: for Alina Codin art represents action and life at the same time. These elements overlap; art, at least, can not be authentic without the other twos. The artworks made in distinct technics and with dominant chromatics, are associated with the important moments or periods in life, following an idea of a time for everything: birth, death, love, disillusion, dreaming, fulfillment and oblivion. Each of these possible and also probable chapters was hidden or left to be seen in so many pieces aswell. For the game to be complete, Alina Codin knowingly swirls between elliptical and explicit. The differences of potential between these hypostases are part of the postmodern spirit of the project.

The obvious artistic and cultural quotes are exploited in a balanced and novel way. Something new comes out, configured on the basis of things that have been done before, but never so. Gestural abstraction coexists with geometric rigor; as well as the minimalist elements with the arte povera ones. The ensemble is, however, unitary through the fluidity of the works, without these being arranged according to narrative criteria. Visiting the exhibition is proposed as an initiatory experience.

The performance in three parts and a quarter (as it was called, announced and indexed), Entering the Spectra, held during the Alive exhibition was designed in relation to the development lines of action painting. Four works, three from a triptych, of medium size and one separate, of considerably smaller dimensions, but belonging to the same series, were made by the visual artist Alina Codin on ten layers, applied one above the other. Strings, paper, plastic or other materials were placed between these layers without being glued. The performance involved placing an easel in the middle of the gallery, then taking the works on the wall in turn and bringing them on the easel, after a certain ritual, and intervening on them by peeling and detaching parts of them. The works, in final form, were obtained by dé-collage. The action was attended by the protagonists, Alina Codin and the curator of the exhibition – the signatory of these lines, plus a series of people from the audience, coordinated by the performers. The works were declared completed in certain phases by them and placed back in place, on the walls, also after a certain ritual.

In the exhibition project ReTurns, the artist established a room for maneuver between tradition and modernity, insisting on the fragility of the borders between the two areas. The decorative motifs are borrowed, with the necessary quotes, from folklore, but the solutions, in general, the chromatic ones, but also the formal ones belong to something completely different, respectively to the freedom assumed in treating the subject, otherwise, an extremely conservative one. Alina Codin returns directly to myths, eluding how they have been converted into forms over the centuries. Instead, she has a personal transposition system, which, paradoxically, is not totally foreign to the real, traditional one. The result is a series of vivid, sincere works, with a strong decorative character and at the same time, seductive.
The artist believes that there are more or less visible links between all things in the world, and that, beyond appearances, everything has a role and is important, from the origami cob to the ability to enjoy art and life.
