Emanuela I H Sintamarian

What themes does your work involve?

I am interested in 1) the mechanics of motion, its visual translation and the dichotomies intrinsic to it (transfer vs. change; action vs. reaction); 2) how memory relates to perception, and 3) the fluidity and tension of contradictions (organized chaos and uncontrolled order). I am interested in pushing the limits of abstraction and suggesting emotional / physical motion in an immediate, visceral manner rather than generating self -referential and/or didactic works.

Describe your creative process.

My multi-axial curiosity overcomes the fear of failing; my artistic life is guided by "just do it", and "what if?" and its the eureka moments mixed failed experiments. When I work, I don't think about art: why spoil a perfectly fine moment with prefabricated desires of "what" and "how" it should look like. Yet I believe in being spontaneous but thinking beforehand. This allows me to both respond to what I'm working on, but also think of the next work(-s): thus, the work makes the works.

What influences your work? What inspires you?

Making art is what defines me as a person. As an artist, I am interested in choices: what remains to be seen, what is absent and how decisions are made. I evaluate the possibilities for changes from one drawing to the next without visual redundancy or content disruption. I incorporate in my visual lexicon elements which vary from my immediate surrounding to Eastern European folklore, the aesthetic of automatisms, absurd theatre, mathematics, poetry, music, contemporary and traditional art.

What is good art? What makes a piece of art great?

This question makes me think of, and possibly find an answer to it in Wallace Stevens’ Metaphors of a Magnifico: “Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ Into a village,/ Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,/Into twenty villages,/ Or one man? Crossing a single bridge into a village”.

I favor works that break away from the linear order of (a) narrative, thus challenge/ question my own experience of seeing/being and become vehicle for extended "travels" into the word of new wonders.