The Receptacle and Other Stories
by Anca Verona Mihuleţ-Kim
The transitory images, the fragments of memory or the
sensations we record in blocks of time weave a magnificent
history of the way in which imagination and reality infiltrate
our mundane paths, often disregarding chronology or
common sense.
The gradual transformation of a woman into a plant in
Han Kang’s book The Vegetarian opens new perspectives
on how our inner life determines the shape of our personal
universes and how the rules of nature have a tender way
of imposing themselves upon us, whether we accept it
or not. The process of perpetual transformation and the
transgressions between the various states of matter are
two internal mechanisms that have inspired Oana Coşug,
during the past few years, to develop her consistent series
of drawings. In her latest works, there is immediacy, there
is expectation and rejection, there is contradiction and fear,
all coexisting with a trace of the sublime and of collapse,
and some shades of humor.
The artist declares that her drawings “apparently look
like ravings, with characters often surrounded by binders
or abstracted barriers in spaces that render a feeling of
claustrophobia. The geometric lines are combined in a
game of abstraction. The portraits are not identifiable.
The hands seem to look for something that is undefined,
experimenting with an unknown space. The drawing is
a means of recovering ephemeral and random images,
most of the time insignificant at a first sight. The birth of
the images is based on personal notes, influenced by
readings, becoming a story in the making”.
The drawings reunited under the generic title Hidden,
which is the name of a future exhibition as well as of the
catalogue, were produced under the influence of two
books — Tout à coup je ne suis plus seul [Suddenly I Am No
More Alone] by Jacques Darras and Invisible Man by Ralph
Ellison — the first, a romance novel and the second, an
iconic post-colonial writing. This polarization can easily be
traced throughout Oana Coşug’s practice — she explores
the uncertain mix of identity within a couple, while the grids
and obstacles, which most of the time are organic, offer the
impression that the invisible Other is present. The bodies
seem transparent and fragile, determined by both youth
and senescence — the posture of the body resembles that
of a young person, while the flesh seems to be hanging
from an aging skeleton. The depicted plants are mature, at
the end of their life cycles, oftentimes vividly colored and
dominant, suggesting hope and eternal metamorphosis.
One of the drawings displays two parallel orange
stripes, crossed by two raw green branches, while in
the upper part, two dark feet are hanging above the
composition. In this perfect geometry, there is no
beginning and no finitude — time stands still, projecting a
suspended materiality.
Another drawing depicts the body of a gracious
woman with extremely long hair entangled in a mass of
thorns, cactuses and dried leaves, all colored in black; on
the right side of the paper, a glowing yellow ball pierced
by a thorn brings softness and evanescence into what
otherwise seems to be a landscape full of barriers and
impossibility.
There are two different types of bodies imagined by
Oana Coşug — a positive and a negative one. Although
the bodies usually confront themselves, out of the
confrontation, a deep transformation emerges, leading to
another aggregate. When this happens, the positive body
delimitates itself from its functions, subscribing to a set of norms borrowed from a parallel universe and continuing
to exist; the negative body loses consistency and all that
remains is a reminder of its initial form: a shadow.
Infinite stairs, unfolded cubes, grids endlessly
reproducing themselves or transparent walls represent
elements of solitude and confinement that can only be
subdued by the vegetal order.
Influenced by Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde De
Bruyckere, Marlene Dumas, Maki Na Kamura and Nancy
Spero, Oana Coşug comes from a generation of female
artists who acknowledge their position and the experience
accumulated before them, delivering a truly personal and
nuanced discourse, without grey areas and not lacking in
confidence. Although careful at the valences of art history,
Oana Coşug rarely references historical events in her art.
Hair turning into creepers, gravitating feet, arms
becoming branches, skulls growing roots and leaves
covering the body are phenomena hidden in the drawings,
which delineate a universe where the vegetal takes into
possession the exhausted body.
While the bodies are usually stylized, the only
emphasized components being the breasts and the hair,
Oana Coşug treats the plants with precision and care,
leaving a lot of space for developing a connection between
the paper, the chromatics and the subject matter.
A special place in her creation is represented by
the series illustrating a sexless body in motion, the upper
part of which is covered in a long mantle. This mantle is
sometimes transparent, and sometimes it grows into a
plumage of leaves or the tossed crown of a flower. One
of the drawings from this series was titled “Interiority”
and pictures a walking body covered in a greenish, stellar
mantle, loaded with water. The hidden body is a reference
to the unknown identity of the Other, that can represent
either the emigrant or the untruthful self. The intriguing fact
is what happens below the mantle, what can be imagined inside the mysterious cover. One of Oana Coşug’s black
and white sketches describes the duplicated body
of a woman turning her back to the viewer, under the
translucent mantle, lifting what looks like circles from her
head. It is a Romantic gesture and a reference to one of her
favorite artists, William Blake.
“Many Weights” is a drawing that presents a woman
lifting a grid above her head; a colored block is partially
covering the torso and upper part of her legs, revealing
the fact that the weight inside can replicate and transgress
into a physical burden.
A couple meeting in what seems to be a suspended,
open cage contributes a ludicrous note; a vertical, thick,
yellow, and watery stripe balances the drawing and offers
a lunar power to the female character, while the intensity
of the male character is reduced by a brush of bluish
watercolor, spread over his figure and by pink sparkles that
come out of his body and seem to land on the texture of
the female body.
The neutrality and passivity discharged by many of
the drawings are compensated by this type of unexpected
details that move the composition in an uncanny direction
and unlock the usual interpretation of how we perceive
the visualization of relationships in art, of how the female
body is not objectified or vulnerable, but rather hidden
and transformed.
Oana Coşug bypasses the recent paradigms in the
interpretation of the female nature, dismissing the carcass
and upholding the volatile interior that she treats as
unbeatable but flexible, responsive to all external stimuli,
and loaded with extra-sensorial capabilities.