“In order to draw, to paint or to photograph – wrote Eugène Ionesco during the last period of his life, when he stopped writing theatre and opted for a new language, painting –, one must know, see, and observe. Behind the reality which is given to all of us, there is a second reality, more subjective, and, consequently, more truthful and universal, and then, depending on the capacity of everyone of us, a third, a fourth reality… The more we enter the successive realities (…) the more realistic we are, that is, the more truthful we are”.

It couldn’t have been a more appropriate way, other than Ionesco’s phrase, to introduce the most recent series of works authored by Andrea Tivadar, Abstract Fluidity, showcased at Estopia Art Gallery in Bucharest from March 21^st to April 18^th, 2019. While replacing figurative approach with a form of “synthetized creation” and abstraction of reality, the young Romanian artist who comes from Satu-Mare and is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, is convinced that “art is the sincerest expression of real life”. But what we see in her works is not at all “reality” in the conventional sense: on the contrary, in a fascinating play of forms and volumes, Andrea Tivadar seems to recover on her canvases an essentialized reinterpretation of an imagined or (re)invented reality of her own.

Featuring a stunning capacity to create unbelievable depths and spatial volumetry with no apparent anchor in the figurative representation (other than the one emerging, through subjective connections, in the viewer’s mind), the artist invites the spectator in her own inner laboratory, where secondary, invisible, mysterious and transparent realities replace recognizable forms from the visible world. Pipings and braids inspired, it could seem, from industrial landscapes reveries, cylinders, geometric forms and vague reminiscences or organic allusions – all these elements compose Andrea Tivadar’s painterly universe, one that the artist defines as “a space of all possibilities”, in an approach that “asserts the purity and simplicity of things”. When asked why she has chosen abstract art in a context when neo-figurative art continues to dominate the artistic discourse, the artist gives a captivating answer: abstraction, she thinks, is able to generate a fluid movement, through which things “are instilled with energy, and this allows the viewer to experiment a state of transition, one in which he or she can focus on the inner mechanisms of painting”. In other words, Andrea Tivadar aims to bring the viewer in a zone of fluid frontiers, where the representation of “reality” on canvas turns into a space of endless negotiation between the artist’s intention and the perception of the spectator. Fluid abstractions about subjective realities in the new series of works by Andrea Tivadar.