:BARIL, Cluj-Napoca
For ART-O-RAMA 2017, Cluj-Napoca-based gallery :BARIL presents a duo show by Cristina Garrido (b.1985) and Maxim Liulca (b. 1987).
Maxim Liulca is an abstract painter. His stubborn approach of art is focused within the bounds of the bi-dimensional surface of the painting. Cristina Garrido is on the opposite side. Trained as a painter, she would rather be described as a very complex and intelligent conceptual artist, who’s approach briefly described is on institutional critique.
The most recent series of Cristina are “Tote Bag Paintings”, in which she is exploring the institutions (art fairs, galleries, museums) as a place of circulation and distribution of art and also the condition that these institutions are offering a context for the public to receive, understand or contextualize art. All this canvas tote bags gathered from the galleries or art fairs, are introduced in the realm of painting, stretched and used as a support in a traditional painting manner, but where the subject already included in the raw material of these paintings is not hidden but saved from consumerism.
The main spot of the gallery’s proposal is to put in relation these two different approaches. Maxim’s conservatism in the way he sees painting as his own realm, his own world of colors and right angles; and Cristina’s reclaimings, re-contextualizing in medium of painting consumerist objects.