For the new edition of ARCO Madrid, Zina Gallery presents a project by artists Codruța Cernea, Lorena Cocioni, and Thea Lazăr. Bringing together their various mediums: Cernea’s acrylic and watercolor paintings, Cocioni’s ceramic/metal bas-reliefs and installations, and Lazăr’s embroidered textile installations, the exhibition allows them to blend into a multi-dimensional ode to the idiosyncrasies of nature and its hidden desires.

The three artists research and draw from morphologies, biologies, or histories of specific plants or fungi, integrating them into their manufacturing processes and adapting them to the materials they utilize. The figure of the plant is central to each series of works – either individually reproduced, like in Cocioni’s flowy algae installations or Lazăr’s soft sphere-shaped digital print, or as a generator of larger visual worlds, as in Cernea’s polished paintings, placed at the core of imagined ecosystems and landscapes.

The booth gradually unfolds organic forms and
textures, extending the formal characteristics of the works into a multi-species symbiosis, while placing the viewer in close interaction with the surreal morphologies of interlaced fungi branches, algae holdfasts or thousands of years old foliage leaves.