ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS
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Hans Theys
Paradise Regained
On Simona Mihaela Stoia’s paintings
Few paintings are as autonomous as the work of Simona Mihaela Stoia (b. 1982). They do not visibly refer to art history, they are not supported by an immediately recognizable discourse. It seems she has invented her own form, with her own colour world, her own compositions, her own play with textures. If we want to learn anything about these paintings, we have to live with them, look at them, try to figure out how they came to be. Knowledge about the artist’s life is unnecessary. Yet such knowledge can make us feel the work in a different way, and even explain it.
The painter spent her childhood in a mountainous region in Romania, where people still live off the land they cultivate themselves. She was surrounded by animals, trees, bushes, flowers, forests, mountains, skies, clouds, winds and changing sunlight. Things still had a taste. Animals still had a name. Plants had a history. When she harvested corncobs with her grandmother, she had to leave the last two rows of the field untouched. ‘For the animals,’ her grandmother said.
Today Stoia is still surrounded by animals and plants: a vegetable garden, herbs, lemon trees. She often goes for walks. She likes forests. Unlike many people who mourn the destroyed or evaporated Arcadia of their youth, she carries it with her, bringing it back to life again and again: walking, planting, cooking, reading, painting.
By accident, I just had her on the phone. She told me she went to see a physical therapist, yesterday, a woman that manipulated some body parts and then left her to herself for ten minutes, repeating this for two hours. During the intervals Stoia started musing and suddenly remembered that Joan Mitchell loved skating. ‘Suddenly I was skating myself,’ she told me, ‘skating and skating. It was really happening. I can tell you what I was wearing. I had white skates and pale blue pants. Very pale, almost white. My jacket was very thick and soft, I thought it would protect me if I fell. I could feel the cold air on my face, everything was sparkling. Then I arrived at a small cottage. The snow cracked under my boots. Inside Oprah Winfrey was waiting for me. We spoke about the colours of the snow. It was very cosy. She had a private chef. We had lunch. The food was delicious.’
Stoia’s paintings are colour adventures with the structure of still lifes and landscapes. The thinly applied ground layers create a (sometimes atmospheric) depth. The looming, half-finished figurative elements evoke the image of piles of fruit, limp hunting booty and leaping hunting dogs, overshadowed by treetops or dark clouds. These compositions conceal classically constructed paintings, such as Le Radeau de La Méduse, 17th-century genre paintings or baroque hunting scenes with monumental piles of wild boars or deer. Finally, there are the (apparently) rough or generously applied patches of paint, which add a third texture to the painting, thus revealing itself as an object made of paint which does not have to represent anything and does not have to have a ‘meaning’, but can ‘mean’ something to us like an object, a tree, a forest, a mountain, a landscape, an animal, a person, an idea.
The most specific thing about Stoia’s work is her exceptional ability to create colours that she ‘sees’ in her mind. Each painting has a proper colour atmosphere, which is built up with hundreds of different colours that have been prepared separately. We do not see one yellow, pink or green, but dozens of variants that together evoke an image of wealth, of tastes and smells, of a physical world in which a skin has a smell, a colour and a certain texture. We never have the feeling that the paintings are messy. Something seems to be happening in them, growing, coming into being. As in an undamaged world, springing from a relentless lust for form.
On some paintings
The Blossoms Began to Fall (2020)
This painting started from a visit to a garden with flowering cherry blossom trees. In the middle, reaching from bottom to top, we find a body constructed with multiple bodies and body parts, a column linking heaven and earth. (At the bottom we recognise a peacock.) Exceptionally there is no sky, suggesting that the column continues beyond the borders of the painting, unifying heaven and earth as one all-encompassing body. On the right side of the painting, just below the centre (see detail), we see two front legs of a horse ‘entering’ the painting. Next to the legs we find three green dots suggesting a landscape in the distance. This last intervention adds movement and depth to the painting. Why this painting started off with flowering cherry blossom trees, the artist does not know. She kept the colours, but not the trees.
Dancing in vain (2021)
Art critics like to surround themselves with things they consider to be beautiful: sunsets, flowers, architecture, furniture, clothes, jewellery, cars… But when it comes to art, they are taken over by a pseudo-intellectual snobbery. Suddenly objects are supposed to require a ‘meaning’. To Stoia, beauty is important. Here she tried to suggest a beautiful dance of animals (a deer, a swan, a horse…) in front of a beautifully nuanced background with beautiful textural nuances.
Murmur from behind the Trees II (2022)
With this painting Stoia wanted to find out whether she was capable of painting a landscape without using the image of bodies, making it a sole matter of colour. ‘Beauty,’ she says, ‘is not merely about aesthetically pleasing somebody. It can also be about the sublime, about an evocation of darkness, destruction or indifference. Death is always present.’
Chaotic Dance in the Wind (2022)
To Stoia this painting is a dance of swans, based on a group of swimming swans she met during a walk in the forest. To prepare the painting, she made a collage with images of dead swans, derived from baroque still lifes and hunting scenes by painters such as Frans Snyders and Jan Fyt. The scenes depicted in these paintings are horrific to her, painful to watch. To create her collages and paintings, she inverses the position of the limp bodies to resurrect them (see detail). The collages are made to make the initial idea ‘physical’, she explains. The most important aspect of this painting (and many others) is the suggested volume of the different colour fields or layers so that they obtain a physical aspect and become part of the total body of everything we can see and experience. (When describing these colourfields Stoia, who speaks English when talking to me, used the Dutch word ‘talloos’, which means ‘numerous’.) Stoia stresses that none of these things came from a conscious decision. They just happened.
Matches Struck Unexpectedly in the Dark (2022)
In this painting Stoia wanted to touch upon the spellbinding, fairytale-like atmosphere of a children’s book. It is a nocturnal scene, built up from the idea of dark water. The composition consists of multiple horizontal colour fields, similar to certain paintings by Gauguin, that are often cut by one vertical element, in this case a compilation of animal’s bodies.
Do We Leave that Light Burning (2023)
In this painting, Stoia wanted to create a landscape in which bottom, centre and top (earth, beings and sky) are connected by a living column. Everything is connected with everything. All things seen are phenomena of the same bodily reality. In the Garden of Eden, death did not exist. In Stoia’s paradisiac landscapes Death is never absent, but for one moment the horrors of life seem no longer unavoidable.
Flying to the Sun II (2023)
Another bunch of hunted birds, heads down originally. Stoia wanted to resurrect them. She made them fly. They became one body. The feet are from different birds and are also painted with different techniques: there’s a blue sketch on the background, the ones on the right are painted by removing paint, the pink ones in the middle are pretty straightforward. The background on top of the painting is painted as if it were a body. The chest of the bird is suggested by adding a yellow contour on the same background as the sky (see detail).
Climbing Backwards (2024)
Animals are climbing on top of each other in the midst of an atmospheric landscape. The landscape has a skin. The whole world is a body. Stoia loves the white drops (on the right side of the detail). An accident creating depth in front of a suggestion of volume. The play with paint itself takes over, thank God.
Such an Astonishing Lack of Consideration (2024)
All bodies become one and dissolve to become a landscape and a cloud. In the centre they become a totem. At the bottom left we see the body of an animal whose leg is made with one brush stroke. In the far back we see some yellow from the ground layer, which is brought back in front of all the layers. We recognise Barbie pink. While painting the cloud, some white drops fell on the painting. They were kept, but overpainted with red. Large parts of this painting were created by wiping away paint. The edges of the colour fields are important.
Some Places Are Still there (2024)
This painting of a garden started from Stoia’s wish to work with Saftgrün, a dark green that becomes more transparent and yellow if applied in a thin layer. In this painting she discovered a possible relation between this green and purple. No pile of animals here.
No Peacocks in this Garden (2024)
Stoia wanted to paint a garden, with a pile of animal’s bodies on the ground and green above. Slowly, this wish turned into an attempt to evoke the texture of a garden. The only readable element remaining of the initial representation is the suggestion of a lamb. The lamb is part of the landscape and the landscape is part of it. Everything is connected.
Crawling into the Sunlight (2024)
At the bottom of this painting, we recognise one or two shapes that might have become bodies of sheep. One has a whitish background, the other is more orange. By adding a darker colour at the borders of these shapes, Stoia creates an illusion of volume. Most of her paintings contain such emerging bodies, frozen in a state of becoming.
The multicoloured background is applied thinly and serves as an imprimatura, the ground layer of 17th century paintings (which is made darker and lighter to suggest volume). As a third element, she adds pure paint, clods, brushstrokes, accidents, eruptions. As a result, the painting hovers between a state of pure matter and a miraculous play of light and colour.
A Cheerful Sonnet (2024)
At the centre of this playful duet between green and red, we find ‘empty’ shapes or ‘shaped emptiness’, created by adding shadows at the bottom of each shape. On top of the painting vivid red wrestles itself from the grip of blue and becomes predominant. We don’t feel violence, but blood, flesh, womanhood, childbirth, eternal becoming, growth and care. It is also a wonderful painting about painting itself, a demonstration of the possibilities and ways of painterly thinking: generous, joyous and open, as the
title suggests. ‘Like to the lark at break of day arising. From
sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.’
The Garden within (2024)
If we focus on what appear to be lines in this painting,
we will discover the emerging bodies of at least four animals, probably deer. Many of Stoia’s paintings are camouflaged still lifes or, put differently, aborted still lifes: monumental piles of bodies (and sometimes leaping hound dogs) situated in a landscape, surrounded by the crowns of trees, clouds, mountains. In this painting we find an atmospheric landscape, with a kind of cloud hanging in front of a dark, stormy background. It is a disrupted Garden of Eden. Under the cloud, against the pile of animals, the thickly applied purple-like paint indicates a kind of friction or eruption. Perhaps a flower. None of these literal interpretations are necessary to appreciate the painterly adventure of creating an environment of colour where such a ‘flower of paint’ can come into being. (Now look at the traces of purple below and feel how the painting is invisibly ‘contained’ by the painter.)
A Heartless Drumming Rain (2024)
An atmospheric landscape with dark clouds hanging over a nondescript scene, only revealing the head of a bull at the left. Landscape painting and still life. The Garden of Eden turned into a hunting scene. A garden of colour turned into a painting. Each painting of Stoia sets a colour atmosphere consisting of hundreds of different colours, separately mixed and gradually added. The dominating colour in this painting is green. Not one green, but many variations. As such, this painting evokes the endless creation of forms in nature, but also in literature, music and painting. It is an ode to life, to creation, to courage, to hope. (Even if a hard rain’s gonna fall.)
Then Again, Silence Fell II (2024)
At the bottom of the painting, we recognise the silhouette of a deer or elk, at the top we discern shapes that suggest horns. Stoia likes to start from an evocation of a Garden of Eden, a world of abundance, the Romania of her childhood, where she found refuge close to her grandmother, whom she helped in the fields. Today she loves to take walks in the forest surrounding her studio. The general colour atmosphere of this painting is soft: pinkish, beige, salmon. Next to the shapes that look like horns some orange creates a glow, creating depth behind the horns. It is a fabulous landscape painting, a beautiful rendering of what nature might look to us if we were a painter. But it is also a frightening evocation of imminent danger: puberty, adulthood, wounds, death. And it is a beautifully constructed symphony of hundreds of colours, culminating in a central ‘happening’ of boldly applied paint, ‘mere’ paint, which doesn’t represent anything but itself.
Montagne de Miel, 26 September 2024