Exit from the Madding Room
2021 - 2022

Anca's series 'Exit from the Madding Room' began in 2021 inspired by her memories and texts for the book she has been started to write at the beginning of the same year. The madding room refers to the thought process and the system of beliefs that guide one's life. She used coloured pencils on large sanded paper surfaces, deliberately slowing down the process and making the result more difficult to obtain. "Drawing with pencils, especially on sanded paper is not allowing you any mistake, you cannot erase, cover-up or change your mind transforming what was already done into something else. Everything is direct and fresh just as it is while sketching for an artwork. I wanted to imprint on paper that kind of fresh energy.'

'I am intensely interested in the subject of perception—how I deem my life experiences and mostly my emotions. Much of my work is about feeling adrift and insubstantial and yet connected through my dreams or visions with something solid, continual and tangible only by inner senses. If I’m being truthful the quest behind my painting at all is this: existence. What largely throughout my life made me feel confused or lacking contact with reality? I was born under a communist dictatorial regime, ruled by fear and insecurity. My parents were forced to abandon me and the isolation and living in a countryside environment marked profoundly my early development. Life in the city could never deracinate the habits of the early years, if at all, only a feeling of not belonging, separation and loneliness. Art developed as my first language, as a means of expression and connection to the world. A lonely child will instinctively nurture as strong a relationship with nature as to inner perception but to a great extent may feel alienated. I paint autobiographical records, informed by my irrational night or daydream states — the mystery and mysticism of the mind — or imagined moments from a past obscured by memories. Through my paintings, I examine the symptoms of alienation reflected in types of conditions such as cultural estrangement, isolation, differentness and powerlessness. Every new series of paintings has to match the imaginative process, not a certain means of expression already developed. Ideas, intentions, feelings must subdue the style. I try through my artistic practice to understand how to reshape my perception and see a nonempty and meaningful corporeal reality as well as a safe and connective physical existence.

Can what I draw on paper be phrased into words?
These past months I’ve been lost to myself. My mind was like a drowned corpse… a drifting line, bending aimlessly, a broken compass needle pivoting chaotically. I kept drawing men. I needed to create such a human structure so I could feel my being solid and stable. I split muscles into petals; I morphed flash into flames. Now I look at them and they are as divided as I am. I couldn’t keep their human constitution just as I couldn't hold mine. Can what I draw on paper be phrased into words? If I could peel my skin and muscles off would I find God in my bones? Sometimes words are the blood sample from a vein in my arm translating the genes that code for painting growth hormone. For I enter writing in a different way than painting, I can observe how the instant becomes liquid emotion. Each thought has an instant I can viscerally feel. They are like fireworks abruptly exploding and breathing their last without an effort, whereas with painting, there is no observer, no fireworks. Only visions surging silently forward, through the fingers, through the nails. No clock ticking to tell me that I am in a now moment, only the silence of losing to myself, of being taken over by the grandeur of an instinct greater than my human psyche.

Does my genderless psyche deliver me to God?
If I were to close my eyes and ask myself “who am I?” what answer would I get? And would I get the same answer asking the question with my eyes wide open? I could wrap this question up by going where my breath takes me by changing the route, but I know it’s never the question that created the need for an answer. And the need it’s like a void. A space shouting to be filled. Have you ever looked into the mirror and didn’t recognise yourself? As if standing in front of a bending void that expects to be filled… and did you wonder what should you do, what is expected of you, or what is this body for? Do I structure myself through this body? During the night I am constantly moving without rules or a fixed structure; I change my image, I move from being a woman to being a man, from a child to an adult. I go where my psyche takes me, outside the space outside the time. Does my genderless psyche deliver me to God? Or is it already God? And when I no longer know who I am I crosshatch men […]

When I feel powerless I crosshatch men
During the day I am fused into this body. I look around and there is no go-between. No space outside the waking I and no time for the sleeping self. I am a huge rupture opening up, running liquid. I erupt my desires in solid rock and then I smash their confidence. Sometimes there is nowhere in my crowded room I could rest. And I want to call it hell or heaven but I cannot decide whereas the pendulum swings twice per second. So I call it life and go on envisaging for the future, untwisting the tangled threads of what I believe to be the past and I keep rewriting myself. Over and over. And when I feel powerless I crosshatch men. […] Have I disentangled from my mortal body just for a brief moment of finding? Just because I saw God for an instant doesn’t mean I can remember his face. And for each new rendezvous, I should enter the void, I would have to disintegrate all over again. For the void can be entered when the space retreats, when the time is folding in and out when the gap between who you think you are and who you are falls to pieces. It is an open state of mind in its absoluteness; a jump in the air with no wings attached when the rupture seems unbearable to be a restraint to this body. I don’t understand myself, I try to live through every emotion that sends out runners throughout my epidermis. I try to experiment with my inner senses when my life seems flat on the outside and try not to get scared of where my thoughts are taking me. I am not a priestess performing fragments of a ceremony, opening my mouth to invoke for God and ask him for a breakout from my madding mind. I have to go against any human validation, to meet my divine particle that measures no physical size but yet is far greater than my anxious human mind.'
Excerpts from 'Exit from the Madding Room' / 2022