Art Criticism

What is Seen Beyond the Visible

by Pavel Susara

Fresh appearances, meaning recent and unexpected, which also have the privilege of being noticed become uncomfortable just because they are difficult to classify and in painting, they are all the more unusual as they enter a territory that has, for so long, been saturated and therefore impervious to surprising experiences.
Beyond any provocative intention and without any subversive premeditation, this uncomfortable category also includes Cristina Savin’s painting. Organized for the first time in an exhibition and conceptually placed under the sign of cyclicity, the works of the young artist require greater attention, as the very concept of Cyclicity should be read differently than a simple abstraction or merely as a narrative pretext justifying another narration, namely the one in the space of the image. Because Cristina Savin’s painting is profoundly a narrative one, but its epic is from a totally different register than the immediate one, which describes moments and direct observations over the outer world and over our sensory reality. This painting’s narration is related to the intrinsic mechanism of cyclicity, that is, the unseen force of generating and regenerating of the being, beyond its transient stages. And the real bet, but also the enormous difficulty the young artist causes and accepts, appears right here, in her efforts to sensorial and intelligible represent what is beyond the world of sensations, perceptions and immediate aggregations of the real. And these glances beyond the visible world cannot be, more or less plausible descriptions, or confessions of self experiences, but symbolic instrumentation of certain conditions in the realm of the revelation, of living on the edge of a mystical trance, which surpassed the range of its own being and dissolves the self in the immensity of the collective being or transcendent consciousness.
But because there are no articulated languages for this immersion into the primordial abyss and no landmarks checked, as our memory, mind and capacity of understanding have not encoded such experiences, Cristina Savin is left only with the possibility of communicating through signs, gestures, tones and primary constructions, through generative elements that, potentially, can incorporate and express, by their lax syntax, anything the imagination itself is capable of creating.
In this way a vague and effervescent world is revealed, a universe of symbols, mandalas, principles, chromatic clashes and seminal coagulants, of energy spectra and humanoid structures at the edge of lyrical revelation with extraterrestrial hypotheses, of paradisiacal beauty states and of ultimate experiences at the edge of the nightmare and the apocalypse in nuce, that is to say, in extreme condensation.
Even though the painting of Cristina Savin is a deep and serious one, in which interrogations, anxieties and, not rarely, obvious episodes of impasse and metaphysical discomfort transcend with undeniable evidence, its general and immediate data place it in the space of a decorative vision. This is the trap the artist is setting for the hasty or
superficial viewer, who risks the unique opportunity of finding out exactly
what is seen beyond the visible.

CRISTINA MARIA SAVIN – The Soul’s Gentle Drift

by Gabriella Niero

The light veil of emotion moves freely across the canvas. This touch defines Cristina Maria Savin, a young painter of our times, who plunges into the corners of the psychic to create a new visionary art where history and nature intertwine, where rationality and instinct combine.
Ancestral shapes, globes and cells, anthropomorphic profiles, female faces in the shade and vegetal arabesques emerge from the basic structure, marked by a distinctive sign. The dream atmosphere takes one’s eye: it is a free world that opens to boundless spaces.
Maria Cristina Savin’s pictorial poetry immediately reveals its emotional essence. It is a journey of the senses through the emotional content of the colors which, enclosed in elegant background paintings, unfold into many evolutions. I am amazed by the genuine, refined composition, by the smallest sign that becomes a trade mark of the shape giving it an abstract dimension at the same time.
The painter, relying on surrealistic suggestions, advances towards the synthesis of the space aiming to purify what is visible from the traditional figurative elements. It is through such a process that the complexity of certain representations, so special in Cristina’s work, stands out so clearly. She possesses an attraction for that “glimpse” which has such a strong influence on the psychically related areas.
The pulse seems to follow an internal rhythm, a dynamic beat following a matter of intimate nature, perhaps related to memory, not without a subtle spiritual search. To pursue those pure lines with one’s eyes is to live the experience of knowing the deep layers of the soul. It is the journey that the artist makes into the unknown of the rhythmic fusion of sign and color so that she can compare perceptions with some emotional questions and bring to the surface, from the deepest corners of one’s psychic, from the layers of the matter, from the infinite labyrinths of the thought, those answers that give meaning to our existence.
The larval figures in the giant cavity melt together in a chromatic magma. They pulse suspended in the air. They may symbolically define nature’s womb which greets the inexplicable mystery of life. To this is added a clear technique that Maria Cristina Savin cultivates with admirable attention. The fluid paint of the brush, with transparent parts, highlights the glossy effect of the details, gives ease to the consistency of the geometry that, just like large cells, moves like the bodies in the vitalist rhythm of the composition. They represent the voices of the soul, sometimes passionate and ardent when in red tones, sometimes calm and silent when dissolved in azure. They melt and mingle in order to become a whole with the color till they become a living breath, almost an anthropomorphic, expressionist yell that explodes in the rigor of the structure.
The contact with the painting remains direct even in the architecture of the image. Cristina Maria Savin favors large dimensions, so that the shape “unfolds” itself with dynamic continuity. It is noteworthy that, for example, the composition reaches the edges of the canvas following the author’s vibrant sensibility that recognizes in painting a certain stylistic autonomy. It is certainly a journey that relies on neo-romantic echoes. The painting becomes a projection of the being underlying its feeling. The anthropomorphic shapes stand out in a visionary context, crammed in themselves, in the thoughts exalted to infinity or stretched, in a moment of expressive tension, between the two moments of Loneliness and of Love. The shapes may twist, wrap in chiasms or in slender positions, limbs that become thinner in more fluid masses. There is a sense of mystery everywhere, the shadow of something that is beyond, beyond the observer’s eye. Even color is seen as a sentimental projection that answers a symbolic coefficient.
That is why the painting of this sensitive author must be seen and understood in depth. Behind it, there is the desire to reach a truth of the senses. Therefore, Symbolism and Surrealism reside on the painter’s shoulders, but with no trace of effort or exhibitionism. There is rather an invisible thread linking the mind to the heart, in the secret desire to meditate, through painting, to the secret pulse of life.