The works that make up this exhibition are part of recent series, drawings and paintings, but also direct interventions in the exhibition space, through which Liliana Mercioiu Popa approaches the aesthetics of ornament as a naturalistic aesthetic - based on biological mechanisms sensitive especially to the formal configurations of perception of the environment. Her works have a strong obsessive and hypnotic coefficient due to or in spite of the rigor and discipline they induce. The artist proposes a new perspective - putting into dialogue two apparently rival ways of understanding and then transcribing reality, that of modern mathematics, through the concept of cellular automata, i.e. a regular grid of "cells", each containing a "state" chosen from a finite set and which can evolve over time, in principle oriented towards the future, and that of traditional fabrics, closely linked to the context of her family and considered more archaic. The meeting points between them represents for her, society's need to assume the reconciliation of technology with nature and the desire for a more flexible perspective on the world in order to incite possible transformations. Thus Liliana Mercioiu Popa offers us, through the conjunctions between the two languages (cellular automata and the ornamental language of traditional fabrics), a more direct approach to the vibration, rhythmicity and cyclicity of nature, the interdependent relationships with the environment and of the perpetual self-generative play of life (of cells) that encompasses all of us.  The fact that certain practices, such as weaving and folk ornamentation, do not exclude mathematical and rational thinking, while allowing for a symbiotic conception of man and nature, indicates that reason must not become an obstacle in choosing those evidences of perception of things that put us in direct, primary and organic continuity with nature. Liliana Mercioiu Popa is an artist who lives and works in Timișoara. She has distinguished herself in recent years with her participation in the 2019 Art Encounters International Biennial and more recently with a notable solo exhibition at Mnac, Bucharest, which showed that her art is diversely faceted, but often reveals itself as a logical continuation of a chapter of art history that is geometric abstraction.

Curator Ami Barak

The exhibition is hosted by ISHO and benefits from the cultural partnership of the Art Encounters TimisoaraFoundation.