TACTILE RESPIRATION

2019 – 2020

Emilia Persu paints with spontaneity, force and grace being one of the artists who blend the performative movements appearing on the canvas with some mental capacity able to essentialise and/or to gracefully abstract shapes from the real world that grow into archaic symbols or into constructions with allu- sions to nature.
Her paintings of large dimensions invite us to explore a range of chromatic, bright or gloomy universes, repositories of emotions and authentic experiences that have marked her existence and which viewers can empathise with.
The objects and installations consist of assemblages and reconfigurations of images, drawings and picto-objects rendering them into dynamical presences that transform the exhibition space into a complex environment where the two-dimensional turns into three-dimensional, the painting transfigures into an object, gestures can be encountered in the texture, while colour unites them all into a route of initiation which helps us discover the artist’s unseen world. In the seemingly minimalist compositions there is a harmonious relationship between detail and whole, full and void. The constructions, well-defined shapes set against contrasting chromatic surfaces are clad in a pictorial epidermis where one can feel the softness of the touch on the canvas, a sort of female, tactile respiration.
There is a certain feeling of ‘beyond the image’ where we can find ourselves passing through the mnemonic screen of our own states of mind, and enter a space of contemplation and reflection where Emilia Persu invites us with the serene happiness of a creator who regards art as a gift.

Marilena Preda Sînc
January 2020
Translated by Árpád Kémenes