Escaping Formlessness @ The Room

Ioana Sisea’s new body of work, a collection of drawings in oilbar on paper, continues her research into the human body and its physicalisation of sensation and emotional experience.
As with her ceramic work, the body becomes its own canvas, with colour and texture applied to communicate its interior state. In the drawings however, anatomy does not dictate form, as in the case of ceramic casts, but becomes an additional tool of the artist permitting dynamic presentations and evolutions of physicality.
In their use of colour and texture to exteriorise an interior sense of being, the works call to mind the watercolours of Berlinde de Bruyckre or Marlene Dumas. In both cases, there is a deep sensitivity to human anatomy, and movement is evoked through precise and sensitive use of line.

In Sisea’s work, this precise use of line creates immediately discernible human forms. This technique makes each figure a transparent canvas onto which colour and texture can be applied to communicate interior sensation: we can “look inside” the bodies of the figures and understand their states of being.
Equally, anatomical features such as hands, feet, ribs, certain muscles or the creases of limbs give the figures presence in a real world of gravity and contact, but are used sparingly and with precision, so that the dynamism isn’t made heavy with unnecessary detail.
Form is also used powerfully, with the figures convincingly depicted as being subject to the laws of nature without the inclusion of any detail from their external environment. This focuses our perspective on the body itself, decontextualised from the outside world, but gives it real physical constraints, thereby heightening the emotional impact of its experience.
The drawings are a pertinent example of the way in which, with the right hand, simple elements can be combined to evoke works of complex substance.

The exhibition is open to visit until November 16th, 2016. For queries and appointments, please contact the gallery at theroom@seabam.com or +40741007000.