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Let us be guided by Incontri to enter the complex and profound universe of Corina Surdu's works. First, we must abandon the petty noise of the everyday to sink into the enchanted "swamp" evoked in the work. She turns to nature, but the exteriority she speaks of is segregated by interiority, by the soul. In the "swamp," everything is sluggishness, silence, contemplation, enchanted rustling, daydreaming, and denial of the phenomenon.
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Vast are the expressive tools employed by Surdu: painting, woodcut, engraving, handmade paper. Before us are summoned seas, vortices, boundless horizons; all under the sign of a transfiguration that often leads nature to resolve itself happily into abstraction. The one who speaks of an animula vagula et blandula is, in particular, painting. Painting reduced to its deepest secrets; infinitesimal jewels upon which we must bend to grasp a rich yet barely whispered essence. What is Corina Surdu's position within contemporary research?
Her choices are clear and precise; she rejects the "overcoming of painting" and the abandonment of ancient techniques. These, stubbornly, rise again because they still have much to say, thanks to the extension of her experiments.
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We believe that she is an artist of anachronism. She opposes a society where appearance clouds being, where technology tends to extinguish thought, and where man is besieged by an ocean of barbaric and vulgar images. As a result, she adopts a dissociative stance in relation to the world; she renounces (happily and consciously) the frontal attitude towards phenomena and adopts a lateral position that leads her, as we have seen, to an idea of art as a fusion between heresy and poetry. We are the fortunate witnesses of this encounter, the passionate recipients, and the enchanted dreamers.
Excerpt from the text by Roberto Maria Siena