Laura Covaci, artist of the people
Imagine that Alice, following the White Rabbit, wakes up in the land of the wonders of the “Golden Epoch.” She then tastes the magical cake and grows until her body starts oozing out of the chimneys of the People’s House. The world in reverse, the universe in a mirror, the reality explodes into a kaleidoscope of personal mythologies – these are just a few of the visions and themes of Laura Covaci’s paintings. The artist creates in a lucid trance, subtly controlled by a plastic philosophy and a pictorial technique that remember ancient ateliers.
Each painting grows and changes its chromatic, goes astray from the initial project, searches itself and changes its clothing or even its being from one day to the next. The very few allowed to see her atelier can witness the work in progress only furtively. They have to steal glances at the paintings of the final piece. This one includes the rest but it hides them at the same time. About this technique of the obsessive recurrence and magical avoidance of the steps leading to the temple, Laura Covaci doesn’t want to say a thing. The discretion she uses to conceal her work is hard to beat. She will not reveal anything about the pieces but she tells us about the project of her future display.
“Proletarian Surrealism” – is a state of mind, an absurd voyage to the center of the Earth (just like in Lewis Carol’s work), where all characters are strange and shifted. Plump bodies, like meat Montgolfiers that remind us of Botero’s ladies, proletarians from Ferentari, with a hat on and a cigarette in the corner of the mouth that circulate a space they are not familiar with, trying to get some reference points.
They are in a place where they have never been before that they try to tame with echoes of their own suburbanism. Laura Covaci is displayed in France, Japan, United States, and has opened a personal display in Belgium and now she tries to imagine the reaction of an Occidental audience to her paintings, to the music of a Gypsy band.
Written by Daniel Nicolescu for Ziarul Financiar, August, 2000