Ioana Aron

This project came out as an exercise of mixing together elements from previous projects, as a recall to Duchamp’s suitcases or to the Fluxus Boxes. My installations contain many “drawers”. An important part of the work is to sort the content of each drawer, to synthesize previous ideas, and reinterpret them into new projects.

That is the explanation of how I put together elements from very different fields, such as: chemistry (bottles, poison), natural environment (water, tree, coal) and everydayness (tub, crosswalk, teeth, doors). Each of these have plenty meanings for me. “Transversal” is like a map of my art that invites you to go and do research each project independently.

The way “Transversal” was shaped at 1001 arte Gallery, creates a parallel between tradition (I have used Romanian archaic objects) and modernity (represented by technology in this case).

The first door project that I have done is called “On the other side of the door”. In 2014, I wrote this statement:

Each soul builds a room where the temperament is locked. On the other side of the door the character features are left free, the ones that are influenced by the habits, preferences and values of parents, but preponderantly, by society norms. May I call this phenomenon intentional filtering of personality? Is it in our power to decide how heavy should the door to our room be closed?

The next important project based on this metaphor (us locking our own essence by isolating it behind a door/ window/ room) is “3D HOTEL” (grom 2015 to 2019). You can see it synthetized in one door (the pink one), as part of this new installation called “Pending”. Each of these four doors represent one important area from my artistic field, one major project. I collected them with different installing thoughts, and then abandon them at the countryside, where in 2020, due to the pandemic, I spent as much time as possible. These doors were waiting for me there, the same as other unfinished projects that finally got their own shape.

I started playing with the concept of becoming with a two years experiment (from 2014 to 2016). Having in mind the fact that every action that we take can never be undone and participates of who are we as human beings, I challenged myself to leave the traditional canvas and paint on bed sheet instead. It's transparency and its “quality of preserving spots” were the elements that made the painting process extremely tricky.

Each brush stroke had to be done as precise and well thought as any important decision. Otherwise, the painting would have get soon a clogged aspect. If on a stretched canvas prepared with gesso you can cover with paint parts that you want to erase or change, on the bed sheet this is impossible. Painting on bed sheet meant for me exploring the beauty of the negligence, that sometimes monopolizes our judging and determines us to act spontaneous and irrational.

Trying to reconnect with the experiment that ended in 2016, I asked my grandmother to look for some more old white bed sheets in her wardrobe. She told me with disappointment that the only one that escaped unpainted by me is a pink one with small flowers. When I saw it I knew that it was perfect. The entire process of becoming that I tried so hardly to catch, was already there, painted by time. That is the explanation of how a piece of ready-made finds its place among my art.

For me, fingerprints do not spoil, but enrich the world around us; the fingerprints are the proof of people’s negligence, that shows them relaxed and joyful.

I remember writing these lines in the fall of 2014.

The image of a scraped tree has been following me ever since. It may have been after seeing Jean-Luc Moulène’s “Allah” in a catalogue from the Centre Pompidou. My mind continued to bring it under my eyes, whenever I saw trees marked with names or all kinds of messages. I recently re-encountered this image in the documentation process for my PHd thesis.

After a long time, I materialized it. The result is the work “Mă frământ”. “Frământ” in Romanian means, “I knead”, while “mă frământ”, means “I am struggling”. My work talks about both, the act of kneading (a tradition in our family that mother thought me and my sister how our great-grandmother was doing it), but also further, in a humorous note, to the process of thinking (a much more elaborate activity than the rudimentary kneading). Again, two main themes are revealed as an antagonym: the everydayness and the aspiration for transcendental.

The object placed in the left belongs to my family from my father’s line. I wanted to keep it as it was. I find its best place in relation with the other trough, over which I intervened with tree bark and paint.