Marius Bejera

The incubator

There is something about the drawings of Romanian artists that makes me want to come back to them. Is it perhaps the blunt and honest introspection combined with impeccable technical mastery? That certainly is part of it. This blend was evident in the work of Marius Bejera too when I asked about his drawing "The Incubator."

- What was your intuition behind the drawing?

Marius: The point of departure is the realization that we are a human construct and our image is built on ideas. The incubator is the environment, with all its cultural and social apparatus, which nurtures and shapes our concepts of self-image. We are constrained by the "incubator of our time," and there is not much scope to bypass the concepts we have to assimilate. This is why the young human figure is over-compressed up to the chest, without much room for movement.

- You suggest that our identities largely dependent on our environment. What factors you think allow us the agency to form beliefs independently of environmental influence?

Marius: Certain works of art and philosophy can awaken something in us that was latent and form an incision in our historical corset that will later pull us out of that dependence on our collective identities and help us identify, select and internalize subtle independent beliefs.

- How do you reflect these factors in your work?

Marius: Exposing images that visualize constraints and place subjects in an environment that can reflect on these factors. In my recent works, I have begun to represent human figures that transcend national identities, somehow as yet undefined, in order to invite the viewer to become a state of multitudes, fluid in beliefs and unbound by altered historical memory. A self-image that is open, never finished, immersed in a space of birth.

Marius Bejera @marius.bejera
The incubator, 2024
ballpointpen on paper, 64 × 48 cm