Exhibition Intuition and Procedure at FBQ Museum | Qatar
Looking at Ilona’s paintings and carpets / tapestries one feels a tension between dimensions. Working on a flat surface as a painter she creates a tension between the surface of the painting and a three-dimensional world.
Working in three dimensions as a sculptor she typically sets up a reverse tension with flat surfaces. Ilona builds her personal universes in the voltage fields between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.
The titles that are given to the paintings reveal their intention: the Polynuclear series, the Tangle series, the Omniverse series, and more recently the Q series. Whereas Q stands for quantum, as well as for Qatar, where the recent paintings were made.
The paintings are the opposite of metaphorical, they do not have the intention to even remotely look like an universe, they are the direct expression of series of gestures, intuitively smashed on the canvases, using wide tipped acrylic markers.
The speed of the operation is essential to the working procedure of Ilona, since she wants to avoid deliberate thinking, she wants to surprise herself. And by that intuitive procedure she succeeds in taking us as the viewers by surprise, therewith orchestrating an immersive form of serendipity.
Ilona works with large canvases on the ground, circling around the canvas and even stepping into the canvas while marking her fast and furious gestures around her, thus building her personal universe. There is no up and down in her universe, no front or back, her paintings are universal in the true sense of the word. Only after the paintings are made the decision is made how to mount the painting on the wall.
Meaning and metaphors are not intended by the artist, and not imposed on the viewer. Now it is up to the eyes of the beholder to jump freely into these rich multi-layered universes, surprising in their levels of detail.
Standing in front of the large paintings, walking towards them and zooming in into them is a rewarding experience, as one starts to float freely in the evoked three dimensional space, feeling the power of the strokes.
Not accidently Ilona refers to her intuitive gestures as powerlines, that are put on the canvas with force and speed. The power she has forced upon the continuous gestures is gratefully received back by the viewer when navigating her universal paintings.
Ilona’s paintings gives us the feeling of being infinitely small and unlimitely powerful at the same time. One is happily caught is the voltage field between the dimensions.
