Both series explore the face as a symbolic surface where identity, emotion, and cultural memory intertwine. Whether through vegetal portraits in FETISHES or minimalist tondi in TITLE IS NOT VALID, the works engage with our primal impulse for facial recognition, a phenomenon that connects us to our earliest attachment figures and activates, through the fusiform gyrus, brain areas linked to emotion. Pareidolia, the tendency to see faces in simple shapes, explains both our deep bond with portraiture and the communicative power of emojis, which distill emotion into minimal signs. In this sense, many of my pieces function as organic emojis: affective signs on living surfaces. Between the digital and the natural, the intimate and the iconic, these works propose the face as an interface of our contemporary humanity.
FETISHES is a series of portraits in which memory and the objects that evoke it are entwined with botanical elements, much like nature embraces architecture and other human constructions. The series pays homage to the natural world and draws from my personal history, reimagining everyday objects from my Moldovan past by embedding them in vegetal forms and weaving new narratives that connect memory to the living world.
Just as dreams reorganize information to structure memory, my fetiches envelop recollections in biofilia, as a strategy to anchor and reinterpret the past. This fusion highlights the deep connection between human identity and the ecosystem we inhabit.
Memories, and the objects that symbolically represent them as fetishes, acquire their own anthropomorphic presence, with a playful and ironic tone that echoes the visual language of emojis. Presented as panels, the works step back from specific details or precise recollections, reducing their weight and offering instead a broader perspective, an invitation to reflect on how memory, objects, and nature shape our sense of self, transforming the familiar into something timeless and collective: the stories we always return to, told in another way.
TITLE IS NOT VALID, in turn, engages more directly with the visual language of emoticons. The format —corkwood tondi, previously used in another series, provides a particularly fitting medium to explore the relationship between the figurative language of emojis, the abstract and virtual realm they inhabit, and the natural, yet decontextualized and therefore also artificial, surface on which they appear.
The result is an alienated, artificial image: a fragment of nature that, while still retaining a certain degree of vitality (as corkwood does), appears as something unnatural, almost like a plastic plant. This dislocation is not incidental, but rather a way to expose the distorted relationship we maintain with our environment, a discourse that, in truth, extends far beyond these works.
And as for the title… I had intended to name the piece after the symbol it represents, but the computer wouldn’t allow me to use it. So, in the end, it was the computer that named the work.
Through these series, my work reflects on how we project meaning onto the forms we recognize. Starting from primitive, anthropomorphic shapes, we connect with vital and profound layers of significance. These projects intertwine personal history with cultural codes and contemporary visual languages, exploring the emotional weight of representation in a time shaped by virtual communication and ecological disconnection.
At the core, the same fundamental question persists: how do we construct, and recognize, ourselves through what we choose to see?
