Mona Ardeleanu: A silent crack

Pablo’s Birthday is pleased to present A silent crack, a solo exhibition by German painter Mona Ardeleanu. Building her paintings in layers, Ardeleanu takes a sculptural approach to her work. In combining the visual vocabulary of the everyday with a hyper-realistic technique, she composes objects that have a mysterious, intangible quality. The result: material logic collapses on the canvas. 

Ardeleanu’s objects are born unstuck in time. Leaving physics behind; gravity, function, and scale are quietly withdrawn, allowing forms to occupy the pictorial field independent of the physical world. Past, present, and future coexist and do not follow a linear pattern. 

…all moments existing at once, like mountains.

Her process is one of discovery. Beginning with a soft background color, she greets each shape, form, pattern, and color as it presents itself to her. Each decision is made at the exact moment where recognition fails. A heart can be a textile fold, birds tangle into the threads of fabric, a dog’s head is confused with wings, porcelain can imitate flesh; nothing serves its original purpose. The viewer encounters an image that is legible before it is comprehensible: perception identifies, cognition hesitates. Finally, the peculiarity arises; the object does not exist. 

…an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one…

The results are archaeological specimens never before seen; things that come from before use, after decay, and outside function simultaneously and non-sequentially. The forms are not objects as we know them. They do not represent experience— they occur. They exist with a self-evidence — not symbolism, not metaphor, but presence. 

...so it goes.