JUST A PIECE OF FLESH PERFORMING EXISTENCE: IN CONVERSATION WITH LORENA BUTA

I think relocating between different cities at a formative age made me realize that I exist as a self-contained entity rather than someone entirely rooted in a specific place. Moving from Oradea to Timișoara and later to Bucharest showed me that identity can survive outside familiarity, outside geography, almost as something autonomous moving through different environments and emotional climates.

Each city and field of study shaped the way I perceive reality. Studying digital media awakened a strong creative force in me and made me increasingly interested in combining different mediums and ways of thinking, from creative to critical thinking. It pushed me toward researching the relationship between the digital and the human from both a social and psychological perspective, but through painting rather than through purely digital means.

I think that duality became central to my practice. My work is somewhere in between emotional presence and detachment, suspended between realities. In that sense, the feeling of rootlessness became less about geography and more about existing in a world where identity itself feels artificial.

"UNREAL" is definitely something I'm living inside of rather than building toward. It became a form of escapism, but also a psychological space that completely consumes me at times. With each work, I try to discover new perspectives of these experiences because depersonalization and derealization are incredibly complex states. They constantly shift, distort, and reappear in different forms.

Since the project comes from personal experience, I still go through these feelings from time to time. Whenever it happens, I instinctively stop and ask myself how I could visually represent what I'm feeling. Painting became a way of processing these states, almost translating something intangible into an image. In that sense, the work functions both as documentation and as emotional processing.

I feel that the absence of colour is the perfect way of translating this psychological state into visual language. Usually, when someone is feeling disconnected from themselves or from their surroundings, they have this gut feeling that something is not right. In a matter of seconds, everything starts fading away, the colours of life become less saturated and blurry, and it gets really hard to draw the line between reality and the imaginary. The shades of black, white, and grey create a kind of emptiness and silence that reflects the way these experiences feel internally, pushing the viewer to actually feel and perceive the depth of this mental state.

The line between focus and blur becomes very thin, because when you're perceiving things visually while in a state of depersonalisation/derealisation, you're perceiving them as being artificial and blurry. In those moments, it feels like you're living in third person and it becomes really hard to distinguish the real from the imaginary, the clear from the distorted.

That blurriness is not just visual but also mental. There's a constant fogginess; a feeling that you are not fully here, not fully connected. Like you're just a vessel or an object somehow controlled from far away. Just a piece of flesh performing existence. Like you're watching a film instead of actually living your own life. A spectator. This is where the symbols in my work come from: dolls, porcelain figures, objects that imitate life but are emotionally absent. A body without a soul, an empty shell. So, if a painting turns out either too blurry or too hyper-clear, I feel that I'm at ease, since it actually mirrors the duality of depersonalisation/derealisation. Sometimes reality feels extremely distant and foggy, and other times everything becomes sharp, hyperaware. Both extremes belong to the same experience, and I try to embrace them both in my work.

"Magic Misery" was the moment when "UNREAL" stopped feeling like just a series of paintings and started becoming a physical extension of the atmosphere behind the works. I wanted the entire exhibition to make the viewer experience that feeling of disconnection through multiple senses and not only through painting.

The tent installation itself was a reference to childhood, to the improvised spaces where children hide and build their own realities, surrounded by toys, technological objects, and small rituals. In the exhibition, that innocence became slightly uncanny. I was interested in creating a parallel between comfort and unease, between nostalgia and emotional alienation. The porcelain figures, candles, toys, and technological elements all existed together like fragments from an eerie, distant memory. I also added sound (white noise) because I wanted the show to feel mentally consuming, for the viewer to escape reality and enter a dissociative state of mind.

I think installation can do things painting alone cannot, because you don't just observe the work anymore: you enter it and it surrounds you. The space of Atelier 35 was perfect for this. Its structure and the harsh, brutal walls allowed the whole exhibition to feel like you were stepping inside a hidden mental space that exists somewhere between memory and dream.

I locate my visual influences in both internet culture and painting itself. I grew up surrounded by digital imagery, especially Tumblr aesthetic blogs, which I still use, and online image archives, so those platforms shaped the way I perceive and construct images. I'm very drawn to visuals that feel eerie, innocent, and cute but slightly unsettling at the same time, nostalgic.

My work is all about creating symbols that express the feeling of disconnection from your own body or surroundings. That's why I'm interested in objects like dolls, porcelain figures, toys, and digitally coded imagery: comforting and uncanny, human and nonhuman, alive and artificial. At the same time, I'm deeply interested in painting materialities and textures, the illusion of three-dimensionality, reflective surfaces, skin, porcelain, plastic, fur.

Even though many of my influences come from contemporary digital culture, I still approach them through a very traditional painting approach in terms of composition, creating depth, perspective, and chiaroscuro.

Oh, definitely. I feel like I'm constantly caught in a fight between reality and technology, always being connected, always there, even when I'm mentally far away. Making art about these states made me realise how deeply technology can alienate us, not only from each other but also from ourselves and from the real world, our surroundings. I surely am alienated and disconnected because of it. And it's not even personal anymore; we're conditioned one way or another to use technology and live through it. For me, it feels like a second dimension that I'm always craving to immerse myself in. It's bittersweet, always living suspended between worlds, never being fully present in either of them. I became very interested in what constant hyperconnection does to perception and identity.

Of course, technology isn't the only cause; trauma and everyday stress have the same effect as well. When the mind drowns in anxieties, sorrows, and worries, it shuts down for brief moments, just to have some time to escape. The brain creates distance, working like an anaesthetic, causing a loss of feeling and emotional numbness. Feeling too much for too long results in the brain no longer being able to process it.

I think once an artwork leaves the studio, it no longer belongs entirely to me, and I resonate with that. My intention is for the works to be emotionally felt by the viewer, not observed intellectually. I want the viewer to confront their own emotional landscape through the work, to recognise their own memories or feelings they don't usually sit with. Even though the images come from a personal psychological territory, I don't see them as autobiographical. I try to leave enough openness for the viewer to enter them emotionally and project their own experiences onto them. In that sense, the work becomes complete through perception. Ideally, the paintings create a kind of introspective sanctuary that can lead toward catharsis: a purification of emotion. I'm interested in art's ability to linger, to allow people to access parts of themselves that are buried.

At the National University of Arts Bucharest, especially within the Painting Master's programme, the structure is actually very open. Most of our time is spent in the studio, and we work with the same professor throughout the programme, which creates a much more personal and continuous form of guidance. I've been very lucky to study under Petru Lucaci's guidance, who is himself oriented toward unconventional artistic practices. He gives us a lot of freedom to develop our own personal projects and encourages each of us toward our individual direction rather than imposing a rigid framework.

At the same time, I did feel certain limitations within the institution more broadly, especially because it still remains quite attached to traditional painting approaches. Since I use an airbrush, I often felt somewhat excluded or perceived as outside the conventional language of painting. But these tensions are inevitable during periods of transition. Our local young artists' scene is really experimental, provocative, and open to hybrid practices, so I believe these structures will gradually evolve as well. In a way, that feeling of being slightly outside the norm also pushed me to define my own visual language more clearly.