Future Nostalgia : Codruța Cernea
Codruța Cernea's paintings are improbable scenes of a more optimistic hypothetical tomorrow, which represent delicate homages to the human capacity to develop sophisticated strategies through which one can behave irrationally in a reasonable way.
Mobius Gallery is pleased to present "Future Nostalgia", the first solo show of artist Codruța Cernea with us, after joining the gallery portfolio at the beginning of 2019.
The opening reception will be held on Friday, February 15th from 7 - 10 pm and the exhibition will remain on view until March 29th 2019, at Mendeleev D.I. Street #2, Bucharest.
The exhibition "Future Nostalgia" presents Codruța Cernea's series of new artworks in which she synthesises techniques inherited from Surrealist, Constructivist, Pop Art and Capitalist Realist currents. By revaluating and reverse-engineering their relationships towards photography, new media, film, and their production of individual experiences and the collective memory, she reconfigures, in synthetic polymer paint on canvas, fictional tomorrows that pervade popular contemporary imagination. Her works depict interiors of a cosmic cruise ship in which inquisitive human beings continue their lives, far from the ravaging consequences of Earth's irrational destruction of the natural environment. Codruța sympathetically informs the viewer of this fantasy world's profound nostalgic atmosphere, where genetically engineered organic life struggles to flourish. With herself becoming the architect of this world, she conceives an alternative possible mission for their voyage.
Her paintings are improbable scenes of a more optimistic hypothetical tomorrow, which represent delicate homages to the human capacity to develop sophisticated strategies through which one can behave irrationally in a reasonable way. Codruta's practice is motivated by contemporary questions about the cultural development of concepts such as scenic nature, environmental and bio-engineering policy, democracy, carbon capitalism and the meaning of happiness. Her intergalactic voyagers become the benevolent builders of monuments for terrestrial beauty, which turn into subjects of this possible resolution's aesthetic experiences. "Future Nostalgia" subverts the dominant individualist ethos and avoids regressive nationalist pathos. The future we are proposed to be reflectively nostalgic about is the one in whose space one can contemplate a present we still have the option to change.
