Marieta Chirulescu’s work is the result of an ongoing preoccupation with the aesthetic and conceptual contingencies of the painted canvas. The abstractions for which she is best known reference the formalism of Color Field painting, superimposed with the array of digital printing methods available to the public today. Drawing from an extensive archive of imagery, Chirulescu uses scans, screen shots and the technical irregularities that occur throughout digital processes to alter personal photographs as well as those taken by her father during the Romanian dictatorship. Breaking down and erasing the images through a process of rigorous technological reproduction and manipulation, she is left with the sediments and traces of the original pictures. Although Chirulescu eliminates most of the identifiable referents within her compositions, her pieces retain the rectilinear frame that conditions our way of seeing and understanding the world: the grid present in windows, mirrors, houses or books, which invariably invades the canvas. The subjects of her work are not the protagonists of the real world, but rather the afterimages and echoes of the “mechanical unconscious”, of scanners and copy machines. Chirulescu arranges and rearranges scraps of visual information to produce images that disrupt, question and speculate on the inherent nature and function of painting, while also inviting reflection on the process of their own making.
