Mirage Sanda Manuila 2016
Mirage
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| Poetry of Renewal © Sanda Manuila |
Sanda Manuila
July 8-August 6, 2016
Reception: July 8 • 5–8pm
Sanda Manuila's oil and mixed media pastel and gouache paintings are stylized representational images from which exude an allegorical quality. They depict a state of mind in which the boundaries between dream and reality have become very fluid. As the figure loses its definition it takes on a ghostly quality leaving the viewer in doubt of what is appearing or disappearing.
Art Statement
Very early in my life I realized that I had the perspective of an outsider. Because I was born in a Romanian family in Geneva, Switzerland, the eccentric tendencies of my parents often clashed with the principles of the Calvinist society we lived in. My friends called me “Paprika Feet”. Later on and yet in another place in California, while working on my Master’s Degree in contemporary Latin American fiction I experienced instant recognition. The novels I was reading were describing what I had been observing for years: magic realism. Raised in a Cartesian society where only a pragmatic attitude was acceptable, I succumbed to the irrationality of the reality described by Latin American writers. Since then, in my oil and mixed media paintings I have been depicting the paradox of two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the unusual as prosaic reality.
I draw my inspiration from photographs of statues and figurines I take when I travel. I digitally manipulate the images until they take a different form. The figures seem to become living beings, yet they are statues, conveying a sense of ambiguity, of dislocation in the eye, and what seemed figurative has become abstract.
