Adriana Lucaciu

(Romania)

Adriana Lucaciu has a special appetite for assimilating various and complex styles and techniques, which gives her expressions a certain “exoticism”. The artist uses a wide range of graphical means of expression, from drawing to easel graphics and printmaking, in the tradition of the graphism of intellectualist origin, refined and encoded diffusely in graphic sequences in which the careful and detail-oriented eye can discern enough references to her artistic and cultural ontogenesis. Although the artist has a plastic module/pretext of anatomical forms, tendencies to abstractionist speculations are also visible in her work. It is precisely this capacity to merge different types of plastic discourse into a stylistic unit, defining her personality and creative thinking that Adriana Lucaciu’s expressive force resides in.

Corneliu Antim

Red Enclave Mixed Technique on Paper 100×100 cm

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ADRIANA LUCACIU – EMBODIMENT

The plastic exercise of the “Embodiment” that Adriana Lucaciu proposes can be considered one of continuous refinement of the creation act. This act has been “moved” from the area of the visible sign to that of a conceptual endeavour. An endeavour – the term “irreversible” should be added here – that has taken by itself the path towards the most mysterious, and I should also say the most recent spiritual concentrations. If an exercise of utopian nature allowed me to take the artist’s place and if I were the creator of the “Embodiment” series, I should change its title to “A Voyage to the Frontiers of the Body” or “A Voyage to the Borders of the Visible”. And while I imagine all this, I also think that most likely neither of the titles I have come up with can cover the whole meaning that Adriana Lucaciu has given to her plastic structures. These structures are deliberately modest and consciously conceived as ephemeral, a reflex of what was once called arte povera, but nourished with symbolic essence and impregnated with religious-sacrificial connotations. The artist does not seek for the latter on purpose, though she discovers them in the same natural manner in which she draws – and breathes, I might add. This is precisely the reason for which the art she proposes is free from any rhetoric or “ideological programme”. It is as if, by displaying her “Embodiment”, Adriana Lucaciu takes us by the hand and leads us to the innermost corner of her studio, to a privileged observation point from where not only the artist, but also any of us can see the first day of Creation. What Adriana Lucaciu offers is, etymologically speaking, an Apocalypse, nothing else but a “disclosure”. The signs on the drawings that Adriana Lucaciu sets in front of our eyes speak for themselves at the smallest undulation of the canvas, at the faintest breeze.

Adriana Lucaciu’s research on drawing is based on the practical experience of an artist for whom drawing has already proved its essential dual nature: to belong, as a gesture, to the inner, non-mediated dynamism and to be, of all visualisation devices, the most adequate instrument of conceptualisation. But is this duality so radical?

Is drawing, truly, pure spontaneity when it follows inner ardour – or inner depression (whose witness art, being equally eloquent, can become)? Or is it rather a graph for decryption and interpretation, like an ultrasound scan or a seismogram, providing the basis for evaluating the energetic flow – already a transfer from the area of pure instinctual drives that some late modernist directions may have sought for obstinately, to that of mimesis, therefore of observation? The basis for writing, for the graphical encoding of a discourse that is already coded in language, in speaking, having its own set of stereotypes indispensable to communication, drawing establishes, in complex and hermetic (like the hieroglyph) or ordinarily particularised signs, the richness of the synthetic contents that links – no matter how complex the significance of the discourse is – the simplified verbosity of the speaker (the orator or the poet) to a virtual, anonymous public. It is enough to remember the opinion about the spoken discourse and the written text that Socrates elaborated in Phaidros. Drawing has a neutral function in this case, all the more so because the text is several transcriptions far from the dynamism of the original hand and not even picto-poetry concerns itself with this aspect that lettrism recalls only casually. […] The reflection on the expressive and conceptualising capacities of drawing advocates the disclosure of the motivational support of the artist’s personal explorations. From this perspective, artist Adriana Lucaciu is perfectly aware of the possibilities of her set of creative instruments, lucidly choosing a certain quality of the medium she employs, nevertheless trying to go beyond the determinism of her lucidity through spontaneity which becomes a purpose in itself. Intensity, tension, unformulated ideas tend not only to find their expression, but also to being captured within the sign that is already a code, a conceptualised reference point, in order to provide creation with identity. This self-exploration (typical of postmodernist self-referential strategies) that shifts from the general – the language – to the most restrictive particular – the speaker, provides a kind of stateliness based on true experience, commitment and attraction that the disclosure of privacy involves. And for the contemporary world the privacy of the studio has become as exciting as any of the great narrations linked to spontaneous action.

The new horizon that Adriana Lucaciu suggests for understanding the art of drawing has a dynamic structure marked exclusively by matters of language, environment and affect.

The possibility to revive the real world in order to project her inner self into the absolute aims at recovering at least a small part of the edenic state. Her drawings have an acute sensory dimension that is almost tangible and very fragile. They exclude neither particularisations nor excursions into the realm of psychology, however abstract these may be as a result of schematisation. One could speak about languages of existence, explicit forms through which the world could be assimilated.

The body seen as an environment, as the paradigmatic and absolute form of the human with its halo of magic and ideality, is cut up from the transitory substance, employing all the functions of contemplation. From guilt to reconciliation with the world, half terrestrial-half eternal, extremely laconic beings that are so close to abstract symbols vibrate in front of the existential mystery. Such symbolism suggests the intimate sphere of poetical expression that is ascribed to drawing — the thinking of the shape through reverberations of the original paths and soft aerial volumes — in the substratum of the sensitivity and vision that define Adriana Lucaciu’s lyrical state and capacity of dramatic articulation bordering on a crisis. The crisis of the incandescence of modernity beyond which anything is possible, including combustion, deconstruction and deterritorialization.

Adriana Lucaciu’s drawings are much more than denotations applied to concepts. They are cultural points of reference.

Dana Sarmeș, Editor

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BIO

New Generation I, Mixed Technique on Paper

Visual artist

Date and place of birth:

March 22nd 1965, Lugoj

Studies:

2015 – Habilitated Professor in the Visual Arts Field. Habilitation thesis: Drawing. Corporeality and Reaching the Sublime, West University of Timişoara

2005 – PhD in Visual Arts. Dissertation title: Forms of Expression in Drawing in the 20th-Century Art The National Academy of Arts, Graphic Arts Department, Bucharest, graduation year 1992

“Ion Vidu” Fine Arts High School Timişoara, graduation year 1982

Professional experience:

2016-1992 – Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Design of the West University of Timişoara

2008-2012 – Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Design of the West University of Timişoara

2016- present – Vicedean of the Faculty of Arts and Design of the West University of Timişoara

Since 1993 – Member of the Union of Romanian Plastic Artists (URPA) and the URPA Timişoara Branch

2002-2004, 2014 –2016 Vice-president of URPA Timişoara Branch

Member of the SemN Foundation since 1994

Autography, 120 x 100 cm, Techinique mixed on

AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS

Awards:

2016 – Prize of the Biennial-Miniprint International Parana (Argentina)

2011 – Adriana Lucaciu. Faculty of Arts and Design between Education and Professional Distinction. Paper published in the Faculty of Arts and Design. Study and Experiment, Brumar Publishing House Timişoara, ISBN 978- 973-602-584-6 and republished in International Graffiti and Street Art Festival. Artpress Publishing House Timişoara, ISBN 978-973-108-426-8. p. 101-102

2010 – Adriana Lucaciu. Visual Arts between Education and Professional Distinction. Paper published in Faculty of Arts and Design. Study and Experiment, Brumar Publishing House Timişoara, ISBN 978-973-602-584-6

2013 – Form-Forming-Meaning – Timisoara Academic Days Symposium held by the Banat Branch of the Romanian Academy, West University of Timișoara, Faculty of Arts and Design

2011 – Interrogating the Present: Exercises of Contemporary Art – Timisoara Academic Days Symposium held by the Banat Branch of the Romanian Academy, West University of Timișoara, Faculty of Arts and Design

2010 – Postmodern Reflections in Contemporary Art – Timisoara Academic Days Symposium held by the Banat Branch of the Romanian Academy, West University of Timișoara, Faculty of Arts and Design

2009 – Art and Its Realities – Timisoara Academic Days Symposium held by the Banat Branch of the Romanian Academy, West University of Timișoara, Faculty of Arts and Design

2007 – Interferences, Interculturality, Interdisciplinarity. The Ethics of Habitation, Symposium, West University of Timișoara

2006 – Integration through Art. Education, Culture and the Social Perspective of Art Symposium, West University of Timișoara

2004 – Creative Workshop on The Artist’s Book, organised by the French Cultural Centre Timişoara

2002 – Seminar held under the „Island” photography exhibition organised by the British Council, The Museum of Art Timişoara

g) Art events organiser

2014 – Founder and curator of the annual exhibition The Drawing in the Studio, “Mansarda” Gallery, Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timișoara, 2nd edition, inter-university project

2007 – Contemporary Utopias Festival, West University of Timișoara in partnership with the National University of Art Bucharest, 3rd edition, under the 2005, 2006, 2007 multiannual “Project” project, financed by CNCSIS (grant no. 1558/2005)

2006 – Contemporary Utopias Festival, West University of Timișoara in partnership with the National University of Art Bucharest, 2nd edition, under the 2005, 2006, 2007 multiannual “Project” project, financed by CNCSIS (grant no. 1558/2005)

2005 – Contemporary Utopias Festival, West University of Timișoara in partnership with the National University of Art Bucharest, 1st edition, under the 2005, 2006, 2007 multiannual “Project” project, financed by CNCSIS (grant no. 1558/2005)

2005 – PostmodernRecuperations. The Book as an Art Object – Sibiu Art Gallery

2012-prezent – Chairman of the Didactic Commission of the Faculty of Arts and Design of the West University of Timișoara

2002-2004, since 2015 – Vice-president of the Timisoara Branch of URPA

i) Member of national juries

2014 – Member of the jury of Inspired idea competition

2013 – Member of the jury of Inspired idea competition

2013 – Member of the jury of the Meeting Point International Contemporary Art Biennial Arad

2013 – Member of the jury of the National Romanian Graphic Art Salon organised by the Romanian Union of Plastic Artists, Bucharest

2012 – Member of the jury of the Juventus Awards Student Competition, Triade Foundation Timișoara

2012 – Member of the jury of Inspired idea competition

2011 – National Photography Biennial, The Museum of Art Timișoara

2011 – President of the jury of the National Visual Arts, Architecture and Art History Olympiads – Târgoviște

2011 – Member of the jury of Inspired idea competition

2010 – Member of the jury of the National Visual Arts, Architecture and Art History Olympiads – Piatra Neamț

2009 – Member of the jury of the National Visual Arts, Architecture and Art History Olympiads – Târgu Jiu

2009 – Member of the jury of the Meeting Point International Contemporary Art Biennial in Arad

2009 – President of the jury of the 20 Years since the Romanian Revolution seen by the Youth of Timisoara Painting Competition

2008 – Cooperation with the Embassy of Japan and the Museum of Banat Timişoara for the Traditional Japanese Costume exhibition project opened in the presence of His Excellency Kanji Tsushima, the Ambassador of Japan to Bucharest, MANSARDA Gallery of the Faculty of Arts and Design of the West University of Timişoara

2006, 2007 – Member of the jury of The Romanian Revolution seen by the Children of Timisoara Plastic Arts Competition, ALTAR Association Timişoara

2006 – Curator and member of the jury of the Rembrandt – Light in Chiaroscuro competition organised by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Romania

2006 – Member of the jury of the national Visual Arts and Architecture Olympiads held in Timişoara

2003-2004 – Member of the jury awarding the Juventus scholarships of Interart Triade Foundation Timișoara

2003 – Member of the jury of the International Experimental Printmaking Biennial, The Museum of Banat Timişoara

2001 – Member of the jury of The Image of Woman, Woman as an Image plastic arts competition organised by the Faculty of Arts and Design of the West University of Timisoara and the French Cultural Centre in Timișoara