Artist Statement

Caught between immediate and mediated reality, we have become accustomed to a rather mediated (cultural, instrumental, etc.) perception of the world, which is why I will stop here with one such example.

The carpet is itself a cultural and utilitarian construct, but one that corresponds to a cosmogonic vision of the world, being essentially a well-articulated image in which the component elements support and generate each other (even structurally and mathematically). In relation to this world, predominantly of plants, human beings are not merely observers (classicists, ordinaries) but contemplators, harmonizing their lives according to this interweaving of the rhythms of nature, which have been deeply felt and transcribed through weaving.

At the same time the carpet brings a temporal and spatial problematization. It is permanent situating in the moment as it is woven. And the space of manifestation of the carpet is not one of flatness, but one of depth (multispatial) or a form of excavation in depth.

In this successive framing of the carpet, somehow synonymous with the levels of knowledge or effective reality, from the micro to the macro universe, the fear of the unknown, the mystery of nature is not dissipated, but is accepted and incorporated as a new articulation (metamorphosis) always possible.

The unmediated knowledge of the world, through learning nature, is not less profound; but on the contrary, it incorporates all the possibilities of the body through direct interaction — intuition, all the senses and reflection (judgment). It is a communication with the elements and phenomena that animate nature.

The reference in the title of the exhibition is a reference to a chapter in the book The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture by Emanuele Coccia, a philosophical thought in correlation with the life of plants, just as, also through the carpet, we are dealing with a kind of immersion in such a world. In Coccia’s view, plants mediate a cosmic existence for us simply by capturing sunlight and transforming it into food.

The grid is rooted in the earliest systems of transcribing reality (from ancient Greek art, taken up in the Renaissance, then in Modernism by its association with the orthogonal system), but it is also the system of threads that builds a fabric. The modification of the grid in the sense of articulating nature towards the small (as science has also observed and shown us, also by deepening), eventually leads everything (to loss in the black/unknown), to mystery, to the inability to understand and explain everything that surrounds us, the universe… The grid finds its correspondences in many forms of configured knowledge, ending with the ecological mesh (Timothy Morton), which interconnects everything.

The fear of the unknown, of the dark, has driven us forward on the ladder of material evolution and progress, but it could also be a motive for scrutinizing the abyss of our own inner world (the mystery we fear most).

Black and its subjective equivalent — indigo-blue (the color of my childhood in the carpets on the walls of the house above my bed, to which I used to fall asleep with my eyes fixed), does not signify the end for me, but the acceptance of mystery, in the same way that the pulse of life itself remained a mystery. In my vision, this color (of the night sky) deepens in the chromatic spectrum, and very close to black, is that of a starry sky. Although there are no stars in the exhibition…

For me, this — the acceptance of the unknown — is synonymous with the emergence of a hope in a world in which this word has become almost unspoken, which cannot be born anywhere else, except within oneself, (although today our attention is always on the outside), as a motive of a reverse path.

Liliana Mercioiu-Popa

Liliana Mercioiu Popa (b. 1975) is a visual artist who lives and works in Timișoara, where she teaches painting at the Faculty of Arts and Design and is active in groups such as IN-FORMAT and Avantpost. Her work encompasses multiple forms of expression, ranging from painting and drawing to installation and photography.

Liliana Mercioiu’s interests are shaped by her personal perception of micro- and macro-historical contexts: her own becoming in relation to the mutations of the world, the historical evolution of the social and cultural climate in which she operates, as well as the balance of forces and determining factors involved in the construction of identities — at the level of communities, social groups, or individuals — all of which constitute recurring themes in her artistic practice.