SUZANA FÂNTÂNARIU

Wraps for My Soul

Wraps for My Soul is an installation consisting of fourteen graves. The grave is viewed as a depository of memory of the mankind. Impressive by its size, plastic refinement, adapted to the materials found in the Great Palace Hall's junkyard, Wraps for My Soul suggest a slow dying out of a civilisation.

Chrysalides enclosing no larvae, chrysalides made up of paper and ropes, perfect for this world's loners to isolate themselves. How did it happen? How did this tied up, wrapped up, caught in tight harnesses, no-face person (so much depersonalized as to find its identity in this very lack of traits) squeeze into the artist's mind?

Wraps for My Soul were created by an extremely sincere artist. They are about us. The fact that the Romanian art, for more than half a century, is essentially tragic, became sort of brand name to the place.

Exploiting the symbol and the referential field of the sarcophagus, Wraps for My Soul are made up of prints that set the artist's experience in time. Wraps for My Soul assume an amount of spiritual imposed to the material by contact with the enclosed soul, condensed in a secret imagistic experience - and the reverse, a tragic enclosing of soul in ephemeral wraps. In these assemblies, prints - a precious and humble material, just like the living material itself - are used in a process of crumpling. The artist herself uses the term assaulted print.

Wraps for My Soul is a perception of self filtered through a cultural perception leading to the Orient. The Orient which, at the first sight, is way out of us. Still, just as everyone of us originated in water, even though not made of water, we live in the Orient's culture, though not in the Orient.

Suzana Fântânariu belongs to the artistic trend that is seeking the orthodox roots, with visual elements elaborated during centuries of Oriental Cristendom. Simultaneously, her art takes hold of the third dimension, her prints become the building material for objects that transpose into space her symbolic language.

An established print-maker, in her evolution to painted object sets, Suzana Fântânariu has drawn on the country's artistic map a vibrant parallelogram of force. Suzana Fântânariu enthusiastically reconstructs and assembles into works of art fragments of her graphic laboratory, at times at a truly monumental scale. Of pieces of plastic textures activated by the vector of printed drawing, hypersigns are born and collected into a germinative-totemic inventory, which the artist once named Wraps for My Soul.

The body theme brings out a revelation of latent experiences, perhaps originating in cultural remembrances and the artist's own life. At first, the body appears as a symbol, the mummy evoking the ancestral shape, an abode for subtle content. Subsequently, the artist makes use of the mummy metaphor in large woodcuts, with a faiint, gloomy core placed inside them and named soul. Finally, both the shell and the interior condense into a new entity, which is the human body itself, as it evolves and acquires cultural experience.