„Ctrl+A is part of research project Ctrl, ongoing since 2021. Ctrl+A and all of its other chapters - Ctrl+S, Ctrl+X and Home are coherent with the major directions in an artistic practice that is increasingly and openly militant. Earlier projects such as Fireflies have already announced, on the one hand, the central themes in Roxana Bloju's creation: the threatened nature, the urgency of restoring and reinstating balance and the urban transformations, and on the other hand the very special relation with the image and its processing. Roxana Bloju approaches photography and its digital processing from within the graphic design practice, one of her specialisations. At the same time and equally so, her images maintain a plasticity and chromatic sensitivity that stay true to her formation as a painter. The images in all Ctrl series are layered - the transparent plastic cut-outs / filters overlayed on top of different landscapes, places and contexts. In series Home, the places of the artist's hometown or those which recall her childhood are identified and appropriated, recalled and re-taken over with the application of the cut-out filter - the most basic and essentialized icon of a house. In series Ctrl+S, hypostases of a vulnerable environment or places in different stages of destruction or transformation receive a layer with the all familiar save shortcut, the most common of all places when it comes to computer work. Other commands - selection, cut and paste - are layered on top of realities the artist documents, accuses or points out. Her messages are always very direct, immediate translations of intention with the aid of the specific - concentrated and essentialized instruments (tools, commends and icons) - of the digital editing. This reduction of the discourse all the way down to the symbol underlines and increases its vehemence, as the laconically command speaks of the fact that the artistic act and the interaction with the environment must both re-become operative, efficient and most importantly re-aligned with the ethics of a non destructive dynamic.  

In series Ctrl+A, the main subject is the nature which reclaims, even temporarily, abandoned buildings and urban areas. These are presented by Roxana Bloju as moments of triumph and restoration, even if only illusory. In a different perspective, however, these urban fragments which are invaded by vegetation have a complementary charge, of nostalgia and also of their highly volatile aesthetic of moments suspended in-between multiple planes of non-existence: the vanished pre-urban nature, the disappearing masonry and the invading vegetation that might be removed in the process of a restoration which will in its turn erase a major part of the building's identity. All of these abandoned places are parts of a cultural ecosystem that is also vulnerable and challenged by the unbalanced urban development. Regardless of their final destiny, Roxana Bloju documents them all as series of intervals and instances, in a personal archive which becomes, in the process, a form of continuity.” (Mălina Ionescu).

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Ctrl+A

Ctrl+A