Born in 1995 in Galaţi, Romania, Tincuţa Marin graduated in 2017 from the Department of Painting at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. Poised on the boundary between reality and the absurd, her art is connected in many respects to the new trends in figurative painting.
Tincuţa begins her creative process by producing sketches, after which she makes sculptures out of clay. These sculptures become the models for some of her still lifes and frequently appear in her video works. Initially, she was influenced to a great extent by the magical world of the puppet theatre, which inspired not only her vibrant colour palette but also the cartoon-like features of her characters. The character that appears most frequently in her paintings is Bigfoot, a huge yellow creature whose body is covered with spikes. It typically holds a knife in its hand and is pictured in the venerable, dreamlike interior of a medieval castle. Although the artist often refers to Bigfoot as her alter ego, its prototype is the ape-like Sasquatch that is purported to live in the forests of North America and well known in Canadian and American folklore. This monstrous, grotesque figure might also be reminiscent of monumental characters from the history of painting, such as the Cyclops, a popular subject in works by Odilon Redon between 1883 and 1895, or even the huge figures portrayed in works by Philip Guston.
As she herself acknowledges, Tincuţa has always been attracted to the ugly and the grotesque; to deformed and abnormal faces; to monsters, symbols, death, and the allure of dreams. Monsters and demons can be found in medieval cathedrals and manuscripts, but rather than being textbook examples of the sublime, the characters in Tincuţa’s bestiary are responses to the question posed by the German philosopher Lessing: “May painting make use of deformity in the attainment of the ridiculous and horrible?”
The painter’s favourite monster and demon is Bigfoot, who appears in most of her paintings and in the surroundings of her studio. For the title of her latest exhibition at Double Q Gallery, the artist has borrowed a quote from Iordan Chimet’s book Close Your Eyes and You Will See the City. Iordan Chimet was a Romanian poet, children’s author and essayist, whose work was inspired by surrealism and the Romanian surrealist literary school of Onirism.
— Mónika Zsikla