Bucharest-based illustrator and art director Maria Tabarcea creates a series of RGB prints exploring the tension between the desire to be seen and the weight of being watched, drawn from the real and ongoing experience of existing as an artist in digital space.
There is a tension that anyone building a creative presence online will recognise: the need to be seen, and the discomfort of actually being seen. Maria Tabarcea’s Relentless Gaze series comes from that tension, which she describes not as something resolved but as something still in progress. “I am learning how to exist in the space between expression and exposure,” she says.
The work focuses on the moment of choosing visibility, knowing it makes you a target. The subject, as Tabarcea frames it, is anyone who puts themselves out there in a digital space where attention can quickly turn invasive. The more people notice you, the heavier the feeling becomes: the weight of being watched, perceived, judged. “The eye of others is both the spotlight and the pressure,” she says. The process of making the series was instinctive and personal, translating that tension into visual form as directly as possible.
The four 40 by 40 centimetre RGB prints are made from a place that does not offer easy resolution. There is no comfort in the conclusion. The cost of being noticed is acknowledged and held rather than explained away.
Maria Tabarcea is a Bucharest-based illustrator and art director working at the intersection of advertising, design and fine art. Her practice spans conceptual and whimsical work, held together by emotional resonance.
Website: behance.net/mariatab Instagram: @artabarcea
Relentless Gaze series. 40 × 40cm, RGB print.
