Nava Aizescu’s oil works, painted on different materials and in various formats, form a hybrid between surreal regions and present reality. Her works, typically rich in symbols, reside on the border between dreaming and waking life, conscious and sub-conscious. While also alluring and playful, her works attest to an intricate conception of reality, which charges everyday situations with threat and uncomfortableness. Aizescu’s paintings turn the outside world into a timeless playground: colorful houses meet with the grey reality, the human face is sealed and transformed into a chessboard, and the sky hangs low and crimson. In some of her works, Nava draws well-known sayings and plants miss-spellings into them. The drawn words, who emerge from within structures, models and spirals, deceive the viewer, and are read as text before being conceived as a visual image. The drawn sentences are provided as food for thought, and invite the viewer to contemplate their meaning and chant them like mantras. The site-specific art installations which Aizecsu creates insert the viewer into a time capsule and portray a visual and theatrical tale. Much like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, Aizescu’s enchanted works create a hallucinated, dream-like celebration, with no beginnings or ends. Her works connect to the liminal territories of limbo and folk tales, and suggest an alternative point of view.
