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Mariana Cornea’s body of work covers a broad breath of avenues exploring an expressive, emotional motive. |
Producing a wide range of approaches compositionally, Mariana Cornea’s body of work covers a broad breath of avenues exploring an expressive, emotional motive. Incorporating actual objects and a representational perspective in some of her pieces, Cornea depicts moments of our reality… and at other times, she relies on color, movement, and the medium to communicate a desired expression.
Cornea’s color palette is often telling, and is perhaps the most significant and immediate indicator of the intended mood and atmosphere of each of her works. Many of her works include imagery of skulls and ghost-like figures floating throughout the picture plane. Light and seemingly air-filled, these images are somewhat transparent, allowing the background to be seen through them. Their arbitrary placement additionally contributes to this feeling as they hover and are suspended in the air without any visible support, as if by some supernatural existence they materialize without any of the normal stipulations demanded by the physical world. Similarly to the skulls and apparitions, the everyday objects featured in many of Cornea’s works have the same sorts of effects concerning their gravity and realistic weight within the compositions. Books, light bulbs, etc. seem only to be suggested, having a sketched quality, they too possess a kind of lack of solidity.
Some pieces remain less specific, leaving out any mentions of the representational world. Focusing on color, brush stroke, and composition these works focus strictly on the formal elements of the painting process. In terms of the color palette, Cornea’s work can typically be categorized into either a melancholic blue series or a vibrant, fiery orange-red collection. Both types contain the same subject matter, and when portraying skulls, the blue paintings hold to a sadness and mourning, while the red paintings seem to urge an anger or violence. Strangely the less pointed and specific paintings that refrain from subject matter possess the same emotional charge as the others containing the loaded symbols. Through the artist’s aggressive application and provocative color palette, the same emotions are able to transpire.
