Artist's Presentation Elena Lupu Seserman

The Tree

a€śSitting on a bench at the shade of a lime-tree, I raised my eyes and I measured with my sight the great and never-failing riches of the treea€™s crown. From that evening, I always had much respect for any human being, who is able to draw a tree.a€ť

(Carl Spilteler a€ 1914)

The theme of the tree, which I proposed myself to study, is a reason that constituted to me, for many years, a challenge, a generous theme that allows a vast development, due to rich content in significations, at the formal level, as well as at the level of symbolic implications.
From a formal point of view, the tree offers a generous pallet of approaches which allow the transfer of plastic structures in nature. All these pretexts have been taken over and integrated in a language exercise that tried to remake and locate the correspondent State of the discussed message. I tried, by studies directly made in the landscape and by storage of some photographic images to accumulate an informational material as much ample as possible, to allow o diversification of plastic approaches on this theme.
I am treating the tree body, not as a simple real object, but as a sign, as an expression of some interior feelings. Wood is only the body, roots are bounds with ground, and substance is a measure, a mirror of the feeling.
I conceived the artistic image of the tree as a complex sign that organically links expression and meaning, able to raise, by the wished expressive form and by its original content, a chain of feelings and representations.
Concerns, at the level of language, had into view compositional, structural aspects, through use of different materials which to confer a plastic and consistent density.
Finally, the reason of tree transformed into a pretext for a recital of plastic expression ways.
Towards this type of approach that combined the experience of direct work in nature with post remaking from the workshop, I wish further to extend the research range upon the theme, and in another plan.
On the step of this project, I intend to transmit my personal mode of seeing and understanding the innumerable suggested structures, those feelings of the tree in his space, those movements, forms changes, different a€śfacesa€ť captured in the subtle insight of light, or in those moments of naturea€™s burst, that multitude of colors, flowers, buds, fruits.
Road through forests and executing of some workshop works leaded to profound study about the symbolism of tree from many research domains.
From the perspective of an ancient cultural experience to which religion, history, philosophy, psychology, tradition delivered to him permanently significations, the tree play an important role in their researches.
My concern is for the analysis of plastic sign taken out from an archetypal space, a place of a possible communication with different cultures. I would make a reference to the Tree of Life from the Byzantine culture and to his generous representation in Romanian culture.
Above these sources, I would like to imply the rich pallet of significations from the archetypal area, the tree making easier the communication between the three levels of cosmos: the underground, by roots; earth surface by body; the high by the treea€™s branches. He brings together all fundamental elements: water, air, ground, and fire.
The tree is the symbol of life in continuous evolution, stir to the sky, tree evokes the whole symbolism of verticality and, on the other side, he serves as a symbol for the cyclic character of cosmic evolution: death and regeneration.
Having his roots stiffed in the ground and branches leveled to the sky, the tree is considered as a symbol of relations that establish between sky and earth. In this respect, he has the character of a centre, which makes that The Tree of the World be synonymous to the Axle of World.
The tree, Mircea Eliade notes, is loaded with saint forces, because it is vertical, grows, and regenerates, a€śhe dies and re-birth of innumerable turnsa€ť.
Study of treesa€™ spirits surpasses the phyto-mythological concerns, attaining those of the cosmology and anthropology, mystical communication between tree and cosmos going to the confusion of cosmos with tree and tree with human.

Exposed Artworks

Painting - Graphics - 16 artworks