A mixed media study of a single sheet of crumpled paper — a subject chosen for its infinite complexity of highlights and shadows within a strictly bounded object. The material additions to the work (actual paper fragments embedded in the surface) were included to complicate the relationship between image and object.
The painting plays a quiet game with the viewer: the embedded paper is real, the painted paper is representation, and the distinction between them becomes unclear at certain points, which is precisely the condition the work is investigating.
About the artist
Diana Moldovan's portrait practice is built on sustained observation and an insistence on slowness — she spends more time looking than painting, and the works that result carry the weight of that attention. Figures are rendered with psychological presence as well as physical likeness, and the backgrounds are treated with the same care as the faces, because a person's surroundings are also a kind of portrait.
She has worked as a portrait commissionaire for private clients and institutions across Romania for fifteen years, and her studio practice runs alongside that commissioned work as a place to take risks on her own terms. She accepts commissions.
