Conventional States of the Unconventional Man - Exhibition Mogoșoaia Palace, October/November 2023

The role of the mask is to hide or protect. The mask can hide both identity, flaws, qualities or feelings. It can protect from thermal, mechanical, chemical or pathogenic agents. By excellence, the mask reverses the data of problems, whether it's protection or play. In the case of utilitarian or playful masks, everything hangs around morphological elements, from texture to shape. It's just that not all masks have material support, and not all of them are concrete. Behavioural masks have the same functions as material ones, but are much more difficult to interpret, plus their possible volatile character. In the project, Alina Codin formulates artistic interrogations about the relationships between the inside and the outside of masks, based on the idea that all elements of the world are interconnected. Thus, external problems, which directly or indirectly determine the interior, are externalised, more or less carnivalesque, through masks. Then, the mask can be the smile, the set of physiognomic traits configured on the basis of feelings and attitudes, or that something behind which we are physically; burka, surgical mask or diver's hood. The artist is interested in masks in a carnivalesque context, in the sense of the upside-down world, but in a non dystopian way, rather in a curative one. Appearances, juxtaposes, joining, coexistence of opposites, consonance and dissonance are harnessed by Alina in a purely visual and metaphorical context. The premise is that, paying attention to wearing our own masks, we are also paying attention to the masks of those around us. Transposed into artefact's, stripped entirely of functional attributes, her masks can delight the eye, stimulate imagination, cheer up and lead to analysis. Mihai Plămădeală, art curator