The exhibition took place on March 20, 2009, at 21.00, within a home gallery set up in a typical block of flats living room.
The first time I saw a dose of self-contempt or some kind of cynicism in Alina's drawings. They were rudimentary representations of naked women, drawn with the ball-pen of with the fountain-pen on paper. Their traits were reduced to the minimum, and their bodies had become a wiggly and negligent outline. A type of generic woman, a visual reminiscence of an inflatable doll, wearing a piece of expanded wheat instead of her sexual organ.
Had they been drawn by a man, the ten images would have been the expression of a primitive, misogynous view on the woman's body in general. I could have said then that they are similar to all those scratches on the walls of public toilets, where images of women are accompanied by instructions for use or by bad words of all kinds.
However, there was even then, at the first sight, a level of understating connected to irony. The expanded wheat pieces (pufarine) - the cheap sweets of our Communist childhood with hardened cream biscuits and fizzy drinks - were the only tridimensional objects in the images. As they were food, they communicated an imperative to the viewer - 'Eat me!'.
The stereotype turned into a joke, avenging some of the mental reductionism associated with the representations of the human body that pornographic imagination is largely responsible of.
After a while the drawings became objects, because they were mounted inside a series of white frames with round corners. The wavy outline instantly turned into an image of aesthetic purity. At the same time, irony became the motivation for the production of precious objects. In a very elegant manner, they placed into discussion the visual filters through which the woman's body can be perceived - this wanted object, almost unknown by some of its viewers.
The exhibition was made up of a series of ten objects. They were distributed through a raffle or tombola procedure to the public at the opening. Because of limited space, access was invitation based only. To this end, 10 invitations were offered to those who wanted them through a public announcement on feeder.ro.
