In Between Certainties
Kadin Tiu on documenting artistic progression
By Yonina Chan
In Break in Continuity, her second solo show to date, Kadin Tiu translates the private process and inevitable struggle of going through the many transient ideas and identities cialis venezuela that are typical of the artist’s life. Depicting this haunting, terribly lonely and at times consuming moment of contemplation, doubt, reassessment, and eventual self-realization, she builds on literal images of isolation and interruption to capture this fragile, floating space in between certainties: when one must betray the suddenly archaic perspectives they have outgrown, while wrestling with the grain of something frighteningly unfamiliar and yet excitingly new and potentially epiphanic.
The show’s underlying narratives reflexively echoes the artist’s cialis alternatives reality, as Tiu at how does cialis work once attempts to represent on canvas the workings of her inner world and her artistic progressions, while at the same time also tries to dissect it and understand it. Each piece is informed by not so much the 20/20 clarity of understanding and transcendence in hindsight, but the precious, if somewhat spontaneous and fragmented analysis of being in the moment.
The artist relies on a subdued palette and subtle intensities to create an unnerving calm—that artificial moment of idyllic perfection which comes before a potentially transforming upset occurs. This is especially notable in certain pieces that outright depict chaotic scenes: in “When Creation Means Destruction,” for example, the use of neutral tones and avoidance of stark contrasts belie the very image of a torn-up bedroom. Tiu seems comfortable playing with a kind of visual understatement, which deliberately shies away from the easy attraction of eye-candy colors and compositions and instead opts to address subtle visual ironies or create quiet impressions.
In the magical reality of Tiu’s paintings, there is an agitation and energy of thought and possibility that streams into and interrupts “reality” in the form of a dark, symbiotic liquid, threatening to engulf and drown out all that is concrete and tangible. This unidentifiable liquid appears to be the main character of the series—by the artist’s own admission, the people in the images are merely incidental, and she often attempts to create compositions that hold up without the presence of a figure.
As such, the liquid, instead, veritably takes on the common poetic metaphor typically assigned to water—in that, like the shifts of an artist’s perspectives and thoughts, it can seep in quietly and catch one unawares, such as in “When memory Becomes Creation,” or else overflow and drown, such as in “When repelling Becomes the Course of Action,” which depicts a struggle to how long does cialis last come to terms with that which now kentucky board of pharmacy overwhelms. The indefinable liquid, like water, is also both creator and destroyer, and also represents a new “life,” as the artist puts it.
In addition, Tiu’s frequent use of a window through which light flows into the rooms, such as in “When Lost in Quiet Contemplation” and “When Searching Also Means Being Lost,” further supplements the idea of transition and the unfamiliarity of what lies ahead: here it offers, if a bit literally, the image of looking outside but not seeing anything ahead because of the blinding light that comes in and, ironically, highlights where one is at the present.
In an attempt to deconstruct/reconstruct this not uncommon experience of reassessment and shifting paradigms for an artist—or for that matter, for any human being at all—what Tiu has attempted is a quaint, but not to say negligible effort at comprehending and concretizing that elusive, monumental mystery which governs artistic—and human—progression. Hers, in the end, is a quiet, if humbled concession to the necessary yet beautiful destruction which she can but gingerly embrace as nothing more than standard process and progress, and hold on to the its promise of a new, if ephemeral plane of artistic creation.
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