TASTE

TASTE

Ildze Balcere, 2022
50 × 70 cm
Embroidery

Taste is a celebration of appetite — not simply for food, but for life itself.

At the centre of the work, a pair of vivid red lips emerges against a dark background. Sensual, confident and unapologetically present, they transform a simple gesture into a statement about desire, pleasure and the courage to experience life fully.

Balcere describes the work with characteristic directness:

“She devoured life with appetite, without utensils. Shamelessly, without ceremony, with her bare hands.”

The words reveal the spirit of the work. Taste is not about restraint. It is about allowing oneself to want, to feel, to experience — without asking permission and without diminishing desire to make it more acceptable.

Yet the apparent immediacy of the image stands in deliberate contrast to the way it was created.

Executed entirely in embroidery, the work is constructed slowly, stitch by stitch. A technique traditionally associated with patience, precision and domestic craft becomes, in Balcere’s hands, a bold contemporary visual language.

From a distance, Taste has the graphic intensity of a painting. Up close, its surface reveals something entirely different: thread, texture, repetition and the physical evidence of time.

It is precisely this tension — between desire and discipline, immediacy and patience, sensuality and meticulous craftsmanship — that gives the work its distinctive presence.

Taste does not whisper about enjoying life.

It takes a bite.

A unique work.

Available through L’atelier d’Art Trence.
For acquisition, additional details or a private presentation, please contact the gallery.