BREAKABLE STRUCTURE There’s a lot of painting being done. In Romania, painting is still perceived as a sort of equivalent of art and figurative painting is courted by most artists. Eyebrows are still raised in traditionalist art circles when a painting graduate goes in for photography, installation or video work. What are the limitations in a liberal profession? In cinematography we find the statement “Everything has already been done, we have already seen all there is to see”, in music and dance we have experienced everything, painting is dead, the human beings deplete resources and themselves too, yet everything goes on, perhaps from demonstrative stubbornness, perhaps from intertia. However, the power of art lies in the ability to say the same thing differently. Starting out from painting, Madalina Lazar reveals the valencies of collage as an alternative means of expression. This is not an abandonment of painting but a resolution of some mature and refined aesthetic and conceptual quests. Thus we emerge into a seemingly barren context with a well-controlled spaciousness, beyond ruptures and some specific elements of the human environment, since the author is interested in a kind of constructivist-suprematicist contextualization. A concern with the representation of absence remains a constant in this coherent route followed consistently in favor of three-dimensional geometry and composition. Whereas avant-garde debates were often rooted in political ideology of a fascist or Bolshevik dimension (depending on the cultural space concerned), Madalina Lazar leaves ideological discourse aside and instead touches upon nihilistic philosophies, contemporary with the Russian avant-garde. Her collages reveal traces or fragments of humanity, representing the absence which cuts subtly, yet extremely harshly across the situation of the contemporary individual. Blasé, in a constant routine, fallen within the limits of his helplessness, the individual leaves his/her traces that are obviously determined by the boundaries of the space in which she/he lives, only preoccupied with survival and not with living. People play out their conventional social roles and do not know how to be different. In their subjective memory they remain unchanged. We see the human being institutionalized, absurd, ridiculous. Executed in selected media, the collages signal violent aspects without employing an aggressive decor. Nothingness is more frightening than presence. In the absence of a saving revelation and religious consciousness the nihilist becomes lost in the maze built by her/himself. The contemporary individual is nothing but his/her own victim. In these collages one sees no solution, hence there is no exit, and death is an end of the line that completes nothingness.
Olivia Niţiş, curator, art critic