The iris of night and the ivy of day, sealed with pomegranate seeds, forever intertwined with the structure of poison of which all we know resides. Put into motion by identities of glass wrapped around us in nets of silence. 

Tempting Disintegration

Discernment of Redemption, 2024, 40”x30”, oil on canvas

Finding myself is fusing every part of myself together, sitting with each version, bonding as friends do. The energetic connection is the magic in rawness.

  

Discernment of Redemption

Figuring out what makes us who we are is a whirlwind of labels cast onto us by strangers and contradictions of our truth, consistently morphing as we grow. Our peace is found in lifting the fog that overshadows our authenticity, becoming one with the fluidity of experience.

Intangible Stability

As we walk through life carrying more weight with each step, our dreams get folded in the packs and the golden breadcrumbs appear further and further apart. The question of your unknown purpose that begs to be answered resonates louder, the chill of doubt creeping through your bones. Your reality inflated by anxiety seeps into your eyes, burning through every nerve in your body. The snapshot of this moment replays, forever gaining momentum in stillness.
  
  

I Am Only One

An appreciation for fashion designers and the way they express art.

Fashion Designer Illustration 

This composition uses Greek-based mythology and decorative shapes to express desire with the creatures and color. 

Greek Mythology Illustration

A live still-life painting expressing fertility, feminism, and the change of season to spring. 

Spring Still-life 

Limited mind can't perceive unlimited consciousness

Limitless

The high conscious person experiences every moment of life in direct interaction with the other existence.While the person sees her own face at close distance he can also see and perceives the presence of other objects up close at the same moment

At the same moment

The high conscious one clearly can see and perceive herself as closely as from every corner.

The high conscious one can interact with every existence even with small details.He perceives oneself being interactive with things in the same atmosphere.

Interaction

experiencing dimensionless state while living on current dimensional world

Dimensionless

The high conscious person able to know someone from the further distance.This state of consciousness brings the distance closer as if it were in front of the person .

Distance without distance

The high conscious human can see own true self appearance from every corner without any extra reflector equipment (mirror,camera etc) . In conclusion , man perceive his own existential authencity. This notion of sight doesn't comes from our accustomed thought process, but as a result cessation of thoughts .The completely silent state of mind allows one to experience one's own existential reality .

Real self

With the recent demise of my closest and longest friend, I suddenly found myself trapped in two simultaneous, and contradictory realities: one based on present, wrapped in the unaccepted loss, and the other one still immersed in the vivid memories of the past.

Due to the current circumstances, I could not travel back home to Romania, and never got the necessary closure. Mourning, like laughing, in a foreign language can and will deepen the abyssal solitude.

When we lose people, we also lose the witness to our own personal history. How do we negotiate with maintaining the fluidity of our past-present-future, and do we (need to) rewrite it?
To reconcile past-present, to console myself, I went to my familiar place: the studio. I have contemplated about unspoken words between us, and unexecuted plans in togetherness. While some absences can fill the world, some others empty it. 

This was the personal backdrop and the factors that led to this project, Letters to the Invisible ones, which consists of 900 red drawings. Each drawing is 11” x 5”.


Letters to the Invisible Ones-view Installation

I initially started working on a series of letters (Letters to the Invisible Ones), letters which will never have find their intended receiver. Yet, I find writing can frame thoughts without too much room for changes, and distort one’s deepest emotions, so I opted for using a system of conventional signs (see left image).  

Those signs could be arranged and rearranged to generate a new visual syntax, hence originally, they were formalistically simple and mirror existing signs and symbols. Their capacity to express meaning and meaninglessness function like any other cognitive and/ or linguistic systems: it is conditioned by the readers’, or viewers’ a prioric knowledge. 

I chose to work on a small scale to preserve the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy of a letter. I employed red ink not only because of its graphic and symbolic powers, but also it reminded me of the color and material used in school to correct mistakes. Only if life would be so easy to correct according to one’s needs and desire.

Then, I started thinking of the Victorian complexly detailed forms, and how their aesthetic is molded by an obsessive attraction to the morbid.  The visual and cognitive structure of my signs, and the aspect of the artwork changed. They become more personal, rather than collectively understood. Shortly afterwards, their importance changes too: from a needed compound in creating direct meaning, to visual punctuation, or bridges between abstract and subjective images. (See right image)


Letters to the Invisible Ones-detail installation

In time, what was initially a letter, started to grow; to gain a life of its own, and develop into a full project. It started to be populated by new symbols, signs and vignettes of real and imaginary objects and become like a codex in its structure and content.
While some of the similes are recognizable, others are more abstract. I quite often explore in my work both non-narrative abstraction and the physicality of modernism. 

 In some of the works I am interested in using economical means of just making the marks on paper; for others my attention shifts to developing my abstract vocabulary. I intended to give them an architectural complexity and work with different concepts of spatiality.
Some of those forms have real-world agency that recall mathematical concept, natural and scientific worlds, as well as theatre mechanisms and architecture models.
 
I approached the drawings from this series without an idea of hierarchy. Although each one of them has an individual capacity to develop or reveal another aspect of desire, memory, and free associations, they are meant to be seen together. 

Besides the use of conventional signs, one of the leitmotifs is the presence of hands, or the tool of tools, as Aristoteles defines them. I found hands to have a fantastic capacity to represent emotions, identities, and conflicts. In a similar vein to de Chirico, who appropriated David’s hand and “misplaced” it in his Metaphysical Interior with Hand of David, I am not interested on depicting their anatomical correctness, rather on portraying their intrinsic power as tools for creating visual metaphors for giving, taking, changing, comforting, dismissing, asking, denying. 

Paraphrasing Tolstoy, happy people are alike, every unhappy person is unhappy in their own way. With this body of works, I want viewers to draw upon their own happiness or unhappiness and immerse into a moment of dreaming; I want each of us to call on our capacity for empathy by connecting personal to general. 



At the beginning of 2021 I started working concurrently on two series of drawings: Frames, (a series of 35 drawings), and Petit Objet a desire (a series of 35 drawings). 

Petit Objet a Desire, a visual interpretation of the Lacanian paradox of otherness and the immaterial, was based on the perception of immediate gratification of desires and the purpose of other(-ness) versus long-term intellectual and emotional targets.

In Frames (shown here), I deal with movement, time, and fragmentation. I question how we understand and operate within the notion of time, hence the need to structure it in conventional and lucrative phases, to confer it a readable linearity. There is always a beginning, middle and end, but I believe they do not have to be in this order. I reference to film, the moving image, to create more cognitive dissonance. It also paradoxically confers the works a sense of visual and formalist gravity. I emphasize the non-narrative aspect, so I break away from any expectations. In doing so, the works become more performative (since they require the viewer's intervention). 

The dominant formalist elements in this series of works, Frames, are horror vacui and highly saturated, almost acidic colors. The clear intent was to mirror the psychological reality. Due to the pandemic, it was obvious the normal practices and status quo did not apply nor function anymore. For myself art making was always a way to translate, interpret, filter, and understand the outside world. Thus, finding new means to cope with the unknown meant finding also new visual methodologies. Filling the space with patterned details of broken objects, hardly discernable, was a mean to remap and reconfigure a new world


Frame: How I spent the end of the world

Two of my theoretical premises for this series were Dziga Vertov’ experimental movie Man with a Movie Camera (in terms of employing anti-narrative to create a story) and Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty (in terms of use of color and positive/ negative space).

Based on a somehow simplified formulation of quantum mechanics of the principle of uncertainty for position and momentum, we can say the more precisely the position or momentum of a particle is given, the less precisely can one say what its momentum is. By having broken down the forms to what might appear dispersed shape colors and suggested textures, and placing them into an ambiguous space, I intended to challenge how we operate with constructs such as space-time in creating systems that measure motion, and eventually assess changes. I also want to emphasize that everything that seems solid, be that fragmented, is really comprised of energy, and particles in motion are subject to human intervention. 


Frame: How I got Lost within the edge of a map

In 2020 we were well into the uncharted waters of life in a pandemic. I had a strong sense of entrapment in isolation, a sense not quite unfamiliar. Growing up in a communist country had the same impact: to survive it one had to recreate the wonderland. Thus, the choices presented were limited and clear: either trip the light fantastic on the sound of a ballade of introspective self-pity or find ways to expand the physical and especially emotional and intellectual space.

I embarked on an artistic journey which was unexpected and personally it had an odyssean quality. I often describe myself as a “asphalt kind of person”. As a child I grew up between blocks of gray cement which were meant to show the ultimate glorious achievement of communism: the majestic urban life. Thus, nature was a foreign land to me. As a young student at National University of Fine Arts in Bucharest I gained an academic training which also included landscape. Since I did not possess the emotional connection to it, for myself it was merely a subject matter which needed to be treated rigorously and academically. Many years later, life brought me to California where I found a new understanding and love for the outside. Thus, in times of turmoil, it was only fitting to follow literally the Voltairean return to nature and incorporate landscape as means to expand my space. 
This series of 15 paintings, Fictitious Open Enclosures, represented a shift in my methodology, and approach to painting. My previous works were more graphic. They were dominated by linear mark-making and flat edge shapes. On this series, the works become loser; alongside the graphic parts, I begun to place more pictorial touches (brushstrokes and color modulation. I wanted to be surprised by colors; to respond to them so I stopped premixing them. I also employed different mediums (from acrylics to spray paint, oil sticks, inks, and dyes). This expanded the possibilities of plastic language and changed the aesthetic of the works.  I use bright colors to create rich and evocative scenes. On those scenes I compressed outside information, with autobiographical moments, yet I wished to confer them their own independent existence. In this way, the paintings themselves become a way to speak with the viewer about painting itself, about places and about changes.

Fictitious Open Enclosures: Road to nowhere, road to everywhere

I was looking through a botanical journal and I came across this newly discovered and odd plant-Nepenthes Attenboroughi, or Attenborough’s pitcher plant. This strange looking carnivorous plant—with its large bell shaped lower and upper body and a narrow lid—has some fascinating anthropomorphic qualities. I started doing some small studies of it; to deconstruct it, to look at it as if I were to peel off its layers and leave just its skeleton. While working on it, it made me think of Francis Bacon’s study after Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent x. I found that everything about this portrait is based on contradictions and elicits fear, mental frustration, and ambiguity. I started to play on the incongruities between the highly saturated colors, the suggestions of a pleasant space and the image of this raw plant, which I centered in the composition. In the end, I created an absurd and illogical joyful nightmarish vision of a non-portrait. 

Fictitious Open Enclosures: Fake plastic If

Right before the pandemic began, I was teaching a heavy load and I was spread over three campuses in three different cities. The highway had become not only the main connecting artery between my private to my public life, but to also have a life on its own. I started working on this series of 100 drawings, Knowing the Secrets of Others, as a response to the descent into a sense of sameness: familiar strangers, traffic accidents turned into small waking-up events, different yet similarly never fully observed places, coffee spills—they all have a story, and all are part of a commuter’s life. I repurposed the time spent in car not only to observe my surroundings, and change their narrative, but to also construct the drawings mentally.

I used charcoal and graphite because their immediacy allowed me to achieve a close connection between thought and mark. In doing so, drawing turned into an exercise in visual memory. I challenged myself to draw one of those highway recollections every day as an exercise in not only maintaining my studio practice, but also expanding my private and familiar space. I amplify my subjects through mark making, increased value patterns and contrast, high play on space, which deepened the dynamic of composition compositions. I intended to reveal the value of daily visual experiences as a topic of exploration in drawing.


The Discomfort of Knowing others ‘secrets: Accidents

While drawing I avoided direct external references, such as phots. I rather completed the whole image from a mélange of memories with imagination.  I cannibalized, concocted, and exaggerated aspects of the remembered subjects. 
I often depicted singular objects, suggesting their inability to interact, and denying the linearity of time. They appear almost suspended in time and space, or portraits of frozen moments


The Discomfort of Knowing others ‘secrets: Absurd encounters


Moments before finally emerging from the ocean, the goddess arises from the depths of her fears as a scarlet full moon rises to the peak of her moment of epiphany.
The goddess has been in cold and inhospitable hell, frozen, crouched, dead. Speechless. Without memory. Aimlessly. She was sink as a flotsam at the bottom of an ocean of uncertainties, unable to speak. She saw herself dying.

But the moon bleeds to collect the Goddess´s power and bring her back to life, and she breaks down, and she composes herself again. And she opens her eyes to a new destiny that will be marked only by the impulses of her most inner and lonely desires.

Now that I am real. She thinks.

Resurgence

An angel wonders, a question is drawn.
Am I my Art? 
A word is formed.
The meaning of the question is changed.
Am I (prostituting) my Art?


The artist's art is not enough. Nowadays with tools as 
powerful as social networks, art spreads like wildfire. 
It reaches remote places on the planet and our audience 
is more global than ever. 
However, art is not enough. The talent of the artist is 
not enough. The artist must also expose itself, the 
audience demands it. Audience hungry for meat. Where does
the art begin and where does the artist end?

This performance is not only a reflection about the 
exposure of the artist's figure on social networks, 
her trivialization or the need to transcend his work, 
but it is also a journey that culminates in the 
satisfaction of being in the desired place, of finding 
herself, of knowing herself real, of knowing that this 
is the way and not others. It is a reunion with the lost
and recovered identity, an ode to self-knowledge after a
journey through a personal deconstruction that has given 
rise to my most mature, intimate and evolved work so far.

Now that I am Real

A Goddess emerging from the death and through the bottom of the sea, fighting for her life and future, to look at it stronger, wiser, and bigger than ever. With magnifiency, with pride, with strengh, but compassion and the beauty of the sound of thousand friendly armies of insects approaching synchronized the center of the scene singing choruses.

Keep Us Wild

Beauty Pageant was taken by Phạm Hải Đăng and posted on August 21, 2019.
Contact for work:
Photographer Phạm Hải Đăng
Email: phamhaidang9882@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100037453320312

© 2019 Copyrighted by Phạm Hải Đăng

Beauty Pageant (2019)

My first realized mural is located in the Embassy of Ireland, Sofia, Bulgaria. In January 2019 I had just come back from a recent travel to Ireland. I decided to incorporate all the inspiration I've got into a mural. The gentle embassy team fell in love with the idea to renovate their office in a way that represents Ireland, to tranform the walls into pure Irish enegry. I was given complete freedom and a great space to experiment with my visual understanding of the country and the materials that can help me represent it in the best way. I had to unite the 3 pieces of the the puzzle called Ireland:
- water - represented by parts of the silhouettes of the 5 biggest rivers in the country
- stone - using my photographs of historical constructions and places
- green - inspired from the specific bright green grass and the endless fields 
I wanted to use a different material for each of them and imagined a strange combination of 3 different materials that I've never seen being used in a mural before - acrylic paint, relief paste, and tattoo wall. Firstly, I created the rivers, using masking tape to contour the silhouettes, then sowly filled them with the paste, forming relief waves. After they dried, I used a brush with dry paint on the top of the waves to amplify the 3D effect. Secondly, it was time to fill some of the gaps between the entwining rivers, using a tattoo wall of my images. Finally, I sprayed the two corners of the mural - left bottom and right top, to lock the composition and represent the idea that whole mural flows from and to the green. 
The creation was a challange, but also my best experience as an artist precisely because of the opportunity to experiment with materials. The 3 elements found the best visual form due to this technique investigation and created an alive and meaningful space.

The Ireland Mural

Seize Beauty 2020 
Painting, Sculpture, Installation

Seize Beauty is a painting that becomes a sculpture which entwines with the environment it is placed in. It is inspired by the beauty of the Australian bushland, specifically in the Sunshine Coast region of Queensland, Australia. The movement of the paint, the shadows and the reflected light on the recycled glass, attempt to mimic natural ecosystems like the bush. In the bush we see a cyclical systems of death and rebirth, there’s no end or start, it’s constantly evolving. In the painting, we see the same, through the colours and the flow that they create. The bold fluorescent colours are accompanied by darker earthier tones, giving layer, abundance and texture to the painting. When the painting is strung up, high within the natural environment the beauty of the landscape is magnified. The vivid colours alert and create intrigue, inviting hikers in, to take a closer look. When viewers begin to engage with the work, they start to acknowledge and pay close/closer attention to the environment they are in. This activates connection, reflection and awareness about their immediate natural environment. Therefore, probing questions on how they care for the natural world and the environment they live in. In a time of climatic changes, living more sustainably, responsibly and consciously is crucial. If we begin to connect to our external natural environments, we can begin to take full responsibility and care for them. Seize Beauty acts as an embodiment of the idea of the natural landscape and the obligatory need to respect, nurture and care for it. 

Seize Beauty 2020

in my body
i hear 


pan .
pan .
pan .


ALL 


demia
demòs
people


TOGETHER


– so i dance –
an smaller version of i
a giant version of i
i’m alive


this woman is alive, ladies and gentlemen
my blood smiles


I Still Am



 


red will

My house is my body
The world came to live within my walls
We don't fit
But I stand still, a thousand arms reaching out the sky
In silence, I listen
I still am

Ex-limits

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A. A. I. G. Magazine

museum

In the possesion of SBC @ Charlottenstrasse 2, Berlin, Germany

destroyed this installation during my first show.

sold @ rocco and sanny auction  on 14.10.2013

sold  @ rocco & sanny auction on 14.10.2013

Developed by artists for artists, the I I I Artist Fund awards a $1000 grant to a recent MFA graduate in Visual Art.

The use of the grant funds is not restricted; we only ask that the recipient give a short artist talk within six months of receiving the award, which will be recorded and posted to I I I Artist Fund’s website.

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