Hellada Gallery in Long Beach is presenting Jana Opincariu and her exhibit Meditations in Solidarity, a collection of paintings created during the pandemic. As Angelenos navigate out of the pandemic, now is a good time to check out the exhibit, because it won’t be here for long. Meditations In Solidarity closes with an artist talk, June 26.
Described as hyper-realistic, Opincariu creates images of bodies, objects and animals that are surreal and fantastical, and some with macabre undertones. She works in photography, printmaking and lithography but her passion is painting. Opincariu works in oil and acrylic but her work is so crisp that it appears as a photograph. Much of her inspiration comes from her studies of Spanish and Italian Baroque, her travels, nature, and her dreams.
Meditations In Solidarity features works from Opincariu’s Black Series and Beautiful Grotesque, along with other striking paintings including I’ve Been Lucky In Love from her Gold Series, Fuck Vegas and a dark, beautiful Psyche Awakened by Cupid’s Kiss. In her statement, Opincariu said, “As a painter and printmaker, I want to exemplify what it means to become vulnerable and romanticize it… These images originated from a place of personal vulnerability.”
“The way we are in our vulnerability … that has to be the most beautiful thing,” she said. “That’s what the soul is.”
The artist said it’s both being light with yourself in a metaphysical sense and sharing yourself as light, to translate love and kindness. If she’s going to preach about this in her artwork, she admitted she needs to be the one who is vulnerable.
“I feel that I have to feel at 200% in order to translate at 100%,” Opincariu said. “There have been a few times where people look at me or my work and nod, say, ‘I get it, thank you.’ They see themselves. That is the romanticism of vulnerability, people learning to re-experience themselves.”
Opincariu has shown in multiple cities across the Southwest and the Pacific coast. Her breakout show, Totem, a September 2019 collaboration with internationally known artist, Daniel Kathalynas, was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She called Totem a beautiful show she would be hard pressed to improve upon [Dark Totem comes to Hellada in 2022]. After Totem, several galleries and restaurants wanted to show her work. She had her first solo show and exhibited in a few restaurants, then COVID hit. With everything closed, she couldn’t show anymore.
“It was eerie,” Opincariu said. “Everything was being cleaned and sanitized. We’re used to it now, but then, at the start of it, it did feel scary. Everybody was masked and gloved. Nobody went into restaurants and there were cleaning stations everywhere.”
Indeed, it was romance that brought Opincariu to California. She hopped a flight and moved to San Pedro to be with her new partner just before the pandemic became serious and Californians were told to observe safe-at-home measures.
Science, Art and Stories
Opincariu had studied for four years to become a medical lab scientist but decided to follow her true passion: art. She graduated with a dual bachelor’s in art history and studio art from University of New Mexico, with a focus on ancient Latin American art. Her favorite part was studying ancient cultures in which there was no writing.
“The arts or storytelling is one of the most important aspects of any civilization or culture,” Opincariu said. “If that can transcend time you could say that’s a very advanced culture. I’ve always been interested in the notion of storytelling … and the idea of image as story.”
Opincariu started the Gold Series in 2018. While finishing her undergraduate studies and encumbered with a failing seven year romantic relationship, she wondered what to do with two college degrees. She escaped into the D.C. Comics graphic novel series, Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. Described as a comic strip for intellectuals, the series is famous for Gaiman’s trademark use of applying human attributes to metaphysical entities, while blending mythology and history in its horror setting. Gaiman’s graphic novel proved to be a major influence and inspiration on her work. Opincariu particularly identified with the character Delirium, who is often depicted with scruffy red hair, punk looking with goldfish and red balloons around her. She thought “that’s kind of like me,” adding she always had a fascination with marine and aquatic life. And she loves goldfish.
She wanted to create an image about the delicate space between her hopes and dreams — red balloons — and things that bring her down — “the materialism of things and being grounded in reality when I don’t really want to be in reality,” she said.
A Fish and Her Pearls depicts a red and silvery/white goldfish floating within a gold background. A red balloon suspends it while the weight of a strand of pearls hangs from the aquatic creature’s supposed neck. Opincariu said that putting an image on a gold background in an infinite space was a strange sort of altar to herself.
“I like the idea of the regality of the gold,” she said.“What I went through to unearth the gold series was a confrontation with myself.”
That confrontation was realizing that part of herself was much deeper and darker. She became fascinated with the idea of the sublime and with modern contemporary artists who brought the idea of the sublime “into immediacy” (or the present) into their work.
Rather than asserting the sublime as a place — removed from ourselves — Opincariu argues the sublime is already in us. This is what she unearths in her paintings.
Opincariu said A Fish And Her Pearls is an image of herself as a fish caught between her hopes and what weighs her down. No Strings Attached from the Black Series furthers that concept.
Opincariu describes the Black Series as a series of portraits of delicate things that seek to find the magic in the space between spaces. In them, she uses the blackest black available to artists. Dead Alive, her favorite piece, exemplifies magic, depicting a cracked egg spilling its yolk, from it a dandelion emerges spreading its seeds.
Dead Alive represents the state of transition she was in during isolation. She asked herself many questions about what she was doing and why. And how is it that people exist in their vulnerability and face themselves in isolation.
“Like an ant, it’s an instinct,” she said. “A lot of us got really vulnerable when we were alone. It wasn’t comfortable. I want to say that it’s okay. … The best things in life, going into them and facing yourself aren’t comfortable… But in facing yourself, in bridging [the] subconscious and what you protect yourself from, you can reach that magic.”
Beautiful Grotesque, an extension of the Black Series, is an examination of vulnerability in solidarity. In her own form of boldness, Opincariu has said that every piece she does is a self-portrait. Her Beautiful Grotesque series was the result of her discovering Hellada Gallery in an open call for its show Sensuality in Art. In a massive splurge of emotion she painted all six pieces within a period of two weeks, or possibly less.
“With Beautiful Grotesque I wanted to paint bodies in a technically correct way and to make them look beautiful but also to make them shame the viewer for looking at them in an erotic way,” she said.
Opincariu wrote something about Emotional Feedback, an 8×10 painting of a nude woman who sits on her hip, arms overhead with her legs together and feet pointed back. — “More agonized than sensual, the title Emotional Feedback is cruelly ironic considering the isolated subject and a tarcic loop formed with her arms. What manner of sensuality is this?” Opincariu wrote.
“‘If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds, behold this pattern of thy butcheries,’” Opincariu quoted. “Those lines are a scornful accusation by Lady Ann from King Richard, Act 1 Scene 2. I thought of them not to assert … the lighting in the expression of the agony, but the paintings themselves, are an accusation directed at the viewer for responding erotically.”
She makes the body beautiful, despite the subject’s torchered condition. Opincariu said all of us have a choice to make, to be in darkness or to be the lightness inside of us and say we are better than what has happened to us. That starts with acceptance, trust and the vulnerability to be open and gentle. She realizes it’s a lot to ask people to be emotional with themselves and with the art.
“People want to come to a gallery and look at pretty pictures,” Opincariu said.. To [say] it’s time to be vulnerable… That’s why I always have wine at my openings and closings. Please, be human with me…. I just want to get deep immediately … to have that discomfort there because I want to place the viewer on the edge of the void — that’s the black. I want them to face that image and that part of themselves, to hold someone there, where they recognize something.
Meditations In Solidarity – through June 26
Time: Hours 2 to 7 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday.
Details: https://www.janaopincariuart.com and www.hellada.us (562) 435-5232
Venue: Hellada Gallery, 117 Linden Ave. Long Beach,