An Agent, A Foundling

Curated by Cristina Stoenescu
November 10 – December 2 2022
10 & zero uno, Santa Croce 270/D, Campiello Lavadori de Lana, Venice

”What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall”
(Anne Sexton – ”Self in 1958”)

Larisa Crunțeanu’s solo show at 10 & zero uno art project space in Venice explores the intricate process of character-making, in rapport with concepts of identity and personal agency. Working across mediums, the artist often engages with metafictions in her conceptual-art practice, focusing on breaking through reality seen as a monolithic axiom of linear experiences. As digital media creates an ever-growing terrain filled of virtual-selves, Larisa questions whether our perceived real-selves haven’t always been partly a work of fiction, and if so, how did this narrative begin?

Inspired by post-modern literature and post-feminist theories, Larisa Crunțeanu creates throughout the show fragments of narrations teasing out possible answers like building-blocks to a tapestry of common experiences and cultural references. There is a performed plasticity implied, a soft malleability in the irregular forms of a newly- created series of ceramic pieces that seem to have been peeled off larger bodies of work. The viewers are enticed to create their own context for reading the sculptural ceramics, partaking to decisions on which animist characters are likely protagonists or mere objects of observation and analysis. The larger narrative tapestry remains hidden, under layers of transformations and reactions of either violence or resilience that come to surface as details with cinematic or theatrical pathos: a vengeful eye is unafraid to stare along a knife-blade in a reverse Un chien Andalou reference. To some, the objects may appear to carry Biblical motifs: a piece of ceramic thorns next to a naïve portrait of a woman swallowing either a worm or a snake that makes for a probable Eve. In other instances, the gradient line of red to white ceramics sketch out a more commercial understanding of the fragmented persona. Depicting a pair of legs reduced to a logo of intuited femininity and exploited by the advertising industry, the work functions in accord to Catherine Malabou’s theory of ”the minimal concept” of woman, whereas ’woman’ has never been able to define herself in any other way than in terms of the violence done to her.”

The contours of the character(s) start emerging as ways of resisting the boundaries and violations imposed on themselves from a narrator that both builds and interrupts story sequences. The artist-as-a-human, the artist-as-a-woman, the-artist-as-a-main- character-author Larisa Crunțeanu takes the scenario from the tactile ceramics to the digital plasticity of the self. Hanging in the exhibition space, there is a chroma key-based background removal, also known as green screen editing, covered with chequered variants of DALL-E AI portraits of the artist. Variations of photographs of photographs of Larisa create strange alternative selves, that may exist in parallel, machine imagined universes. Some odd outcomes of the artificially created portraits test the limit of what one can accept as human, at the boundary between culturally- defined aesthetics and the uncanny valley feelings of uneasiness towards the digital prints sewn into the fabric.

Similarly, the video-work 12 years is an artificially constructed story, out of stock-photo images and filmed snippets of ready-made-emotions. It tells the bitter and absurd story of a man desperate to dedicate years of his life in order to retrieve a discarded bitcoin wallet in the middle of the mid-pandemic crypto boom. Narrated by an even- voiced variant of Larisa Crunțeanu, the video-work shifts gears towards the end, with hand-filmed footage from a gloomy garbage landfill, abruptly breaking from the digital simulation to an un-romanticized landscape in the now war-ridden Eastern European context.

The show means to anchor the virtual defragmentation into marks of the real, only if to plunge it again into narrative chaos. There are instances when a performative body is ghostly present, either in the hands that moulded the uneven surfaces of the ceramics, or of the incorporeal voice of the sound work ”Good God”(2019). A minimalist cyanotype on paper artwork tracks running footsteps to a final jump of quiet absence.

(text by Cristina Stoenescu)

Images: Filippo Molena