Elian’s personal exhibition under the name of “Erotica” was the exhibition that inaugurated Hag Gallery in spring. The female body has been for a long time in the painter’s view. An ambiguous narcissism particularized certain older hypostases. The nude was wrapped in Renascent-Styled, and sometimes Klimtian nuances. The tone passages and sumptuous pictorial defined it. In 2001, the register of plastic symbol changed dramatically, a sensual graphics counterpointed by the „eruption” of some flat chromatic, circular stains built both the feminine body and the erotic hypostases of the couple. I remembered then of Warhol at the beginning of the sixties, of emergent American pop art and of Liechtenstein. The coloured “spots” came also from another investigating direction, for short time: in 2000, experiencing the painting approach to other “hot” visual languages, Elian attempted to equate some effects and computer image infrastructure with painting means. “Descent to pixels” resulted to a sort of contemporary pointing, an advanced decomposition of figurative… A formal-chromatic elaboration diminishing contours, colours, a “scharf” disorder- that sent to Gerhard Richter to a certain type of relationships between photography and painting, were already present in Erotica. The consequence: an apparent camouflage, let’s say romantic, of eroticism; however, perhaps, a subtIle intensification over against its.
ADRIAN GUTA / Cultural Observer, november 2002
