Laura Covaci – Cruel Fairy Tale
“Monstrous and stupendous”, this eerie painting may seem even unbearable at a first glance, due to its uncanny theme and its fluorescent palette. Cosmic stillborns, hybrid humanoids of various extractions, spectacular and unsettling virtual creatures etc. While dominated by an unconscious mind that is uncomfortable with biological limits, with metaphysical interdictions and with both inherited and imaginary fears, Laura Covaci is an imaginative and ruthless explorer of an ever erupting fantasy. Her imaginary world is impregnated with new media art and bio-technology along with the most recent comic strips and Science Fiction movies. Her imaginary world dares to combine and cohere all these influences that are so impregnated within the contemporary psyche, while in so doing she manages to set up a series of fictional visual narratives which are either helplessly entangled or perplexingly simple and terrifyingly poetical. This imaginary world is both very personal, jocular and sarcastic, neo-Baroque and futuristic-Rococo – while preserving a touch of impersonality in its traits that seem symptomatic of a new human sensitivity that is emergent. Laura Covaci’s art, while artificial and unsettling, nagging and illuminating, is nourished by a tempered ardor that explores, not without a bit of playful wryness, those mental areas responsible for the most hazardous informational syntheses. It nonetheless pervades the subconscious areas of the psyche, where chimeras and contradictory archetypes are being reactivated: they are in the same time luminous or jazzy in appearance and paradoxical, subject to a “lucid trance” recalling of the daring and impenetrable movies directed by David Lynch. Laura Covaci’s paintings are both unsettling and exquisitely done, maybe a bit too “trans” for our prone to “everything-natural-and-organic” taste. Her art being so perfectly artificially executed on the computer probes in its recent series that „obsessive post-human future“ towards which we pace, for the moment, mostly within the confines of our inner space, through aesthetic exploration. Laura Covaci’s mutant beings remind us of novels such as Daniel-Philippe de Sudres’ “Les enfants de demain” where a both better and uncanny humanity hastes to emerge, forcing us to rethink our sensorial habits, our spiritual landmarks, and our only too human limitations. This is art that paves our way to a life in cyberspace.
Magda Carneci, Arta Magazine, 2014