A figure falling — but falling upward, into a blue that is neither sky nor water but both and neither. The orientation of the figure makes the direction of the fall ambiguous: read one way, she is descending into blue; read another, she is rising from it.
Acrylic allowed the blue to be built up in many thin washes, each adding depth to the field that the figure falls through rather than across. The figure itself was painted in two sessions with a realist care that contrasts deliberately with the impossibility of her situation.
About the artist
Andreea Stoica makes paintings that place human figures in situations that feeling makes real but physics does not permit — a woman walking on water, a man whose shadow belongs to someone else, a room that ends where the light ends and offers no wall beyond. The figures are handled with realist technique that makes their impossible predicament all the more disorienting.
She studied in Bucharest and Florence, and has been developing her surrealist practice for eight years. The paintings are slow to make and rarely produced in series — each one is a self-contained investigation of a single impossible proposition. She does not accept commissions.
