No. 35 / September 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Observator Cultural magazine, august 2013
Summer is a period of relative pause in the calendar of events in the area of fine arts, August having absolute supremacy in this regard. As I said on a number of previous occasions, the visual artist never breaks with his activity, at least not in relation to the seasons. Moreover, the preparations for what we could call in the given context of the autumn season reach their peak exactly during the holiday moments, corresponding to the break brought into discussion. Creative art residences, symposia or active retreats in the studio are the preview of what will follow in the gallery program, starting from fall.
In the lines below I will focus on one of the projects that I consider the winner, “Nude” (2013), o solo show by the young artist Lidia Alina Nicolae.
The title involves an ambiguity thought in playful terms: it invites to be read both in Romanian and in English, the spelling being the same in both cases. What matters is that the chosen theme, not at all easy for a true artist, swings around the ideas of body, woman and erotic potential. Before launching into the commentary of the homonymous exhibition, which is scheduled for the second decade of September at the Art Yourself Gallery in Bucharest, I will briefly review the main ways of approaching the nude, from a historical perspective.
Represented as part of normality in Egyptian culture, the nude becomes for the ancient Greeks, later for the Romans, a symbol of human virtues. In the Early Middle Ages, nakedness represents humility, or rather humiliation, decay. Adam and Eve, related to the Fall Into Sin (as an iconographic theme), the Crucifixion or putti (ornamental angels) are among the few opportunities to represent nudity. With the Renaissance, ancient values are rediscovered, the valences of the nude developing exponentially. The erotic side began to become a goal in itself with the Baroque, and then knew a special treatment in Impressionism. Finally, Cubism, Modernism and Postmodernism propose multiple routes of the nude theme, between limits related to graphic sign, chromatic, exceeding the waiting horizon and even shock. In these conditions, the entry nowadays in the commented subject is a real incursion in a mined land.
Among the problems that the artist has to solve when treating the nude, especially the female one, we mention the possible mannerist crisis, respectively taking over an established pattern, dangerous approach to images with declared erotic function and strictly realistic, academic or school approach, which way the reader prefers. That being said, I will turn my attention to Lidia Alina’s project, “Nude”.
The artist, who has mastered anatomy since her college years, opted to intentionally exaggerate the muscles of her models, corresponding to the male nude. The resulting images do not depict female bodybuilders, but create an ambivalent sense of androgyny and antagonism. The possible erotic component was canceled by the partial dressing of her nudes, with really postmodern tights from the strict point of view of painting and graphics, not of clothing design. The garments that appear have no active function in the images, being distinct both chromatically and thematically. In fact, in a number of works, the artist uses a non-figurative stain or hatch to obscure the explicit angles of visibility of the bodies. What matters are, in addition to the artistic anatomy, the perspective lines on which the nudes unfold according to the degrees of freedom of the joints and the proportions, the planimetry represented by the carnation, the saturation and desaturation related to the perspective and last but not least the innovation on the position of the models. observation points on them.
An earlier project by Lidia Nicolae involved artistic research into how the human body is transposed by contact with a support. The starting pretext was on that occasion the study of the Egyptian mummy. The draping that hides to reveal the shape, the printing by imprinting with the help of the pigment, or the distortion by unfolding, let’s say cubist – realistic, are just some of the stakes of the respective project. Therefore, Lidia did not get to the theme of the nude because in the world nudes are sought and she does not target the living rooms of the petty bourgeois collector. It is a graphic approach that invites meditation. The problems we can ask ourselves by reading his images are related to eros and tanatos, beauty, subjective reality and last but not least ephemerality. To the possible question of what beauty is, the viewer will certainly weigh the idea of the Platonic dialogue, if beauty is somehow a beautiful woman, of course, if he does not consider ab initio that everyone knows what beauty is and that the question is pointless.