Mind Set art Center is pleased to present Between the Visible and the Invisible, the first solo exhibition in Asia for Oana Farcas, taking place at our gallery in Taipei from April 11 to May 17, 2014. Farcas is considered one of the most talented contemporary painters in Romania. In the exhibition, viewers can see wide range of the artist’s works, dimensions from average scale to miniatures. Whether the style or display reveals the artist’s strong attribute of art making.
“Between the visible and the invisible” penetrates the core of the exhibition theme, also the world of Farcas’s paintings. She likes to create things with ambiguous features to confuse viewers and simultaneously challenges the common knowledge about physical feeling and optical sensation.With her focus on the portrait, Farcas invites the viewer's participation and indeed the sense of things being left open is an important part of her practice.
According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Eye and Mind ”, the human not only recognizes those things that constitute the world; he sees himself within it, and this ability to see is intertwined with an ability to move. There is no line that separates internal from external, instead there exists a reflexivity of vision, where the body that sees, is also watching itself. The view of perception is sort of phenomenological concept, especially in relation to Farcas’s art. What she feels and 'sees' in her mind's eye is combined by seen and felt experiences in reality and who is to say that one is less real than the other when both can be translated into memories, and after both are re-born and co-existent within the grounds of her paintings? Farcas can be viewed as trying to give meaning to that world in which we all take refuge when we have daydreams. 'I want to paint the things I like and love, but I want them to exist in a safer world, so I create new ones. Every fairy tale has truth in it somehow and perhaps the rules that govern the worlds of fairy tales and dreams make these worlds somehow more right and fair and so I trust these worlds more.' Farcas explains.
Oana Farcas is born in Cluj, Romania in 1981, considered one of most potential and talented artists among her age group. She’s been exhibiting in many major cities in Europe and the States. Yet the painterly quality of Farcas's work is a world away from photo realism. It brings a warmth and a depth that is somehow only possible in paint, a richness that ties together disparate elements, and that which is imagined and real within one elastic language. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the artist's ability to see the world is impossible to separate from his ability to move through it. From this point it is possible to go on to therefore claim that painting is as much a felt experience as a visual one. The artist needs to feel herself in her paintings, and to make it possible for others to also find themselves in the work. Farcas knows this, which is what makes her paintings so arresting and seductive.