Elian studies in “Soap Opera”, as an artist, another alternative to adapt painting to contemporary mechanisms of image structuring and perception. Oil on canvas is giving now a reply to the television sequence. Always challenging herself and the en-vogue trends, Elian makes an actual art, however, making no bones about navigating à rebours. She “freezes” the cinematic image within the painted canvas. The “shadowed” band that crosses the images in cinema productions of television flow becomes in Elian’s paintings an item of construction, composing rhythm. The “down-written” text gets the valence of plastic symbol (on the other hand, from the “replies” integrated in the works included in “Sopa Opera” series we can constitute a concentrated narration, a cultural product with autonomous value). The present series “Soap Opera” reveals, once again, the ironic and ludic spirit of the artist. But, according to her confess, at a closer look/analys to the offer of a soap opera, Elian has overpassed the clisee in order to extract from this cinematographic productions a significant core which reveals through narrative fragments /pieces, truly revealling facts of the woman and couple condition nowdays. Beyond the anaesthetised effect, the soap opera reveals involuntarelly, perhaps the alienation: it is a scenary-based “documentary” of every day life joys and troubles.
ADRIAN GUTA / Cultural Observer, november 2002
