Dana Constantin’s artistic activity can be interpreted as a skilful strategy of ‘rehabilitating’
painting between le faire and la magie, to use Diderot’s well-known words. Trying to analyze the fundamental coordinates of her artistic biography, I have discovered a coherent trajectory characterized by simplification, thoroughness, and essentialization. The disorder of natural forms was gradually subjected to purification and concentration of the fundamental means of painting: the point, the line and colour (or, more precisely, the surface covered in colours).
What does Dana Constantin propose in her visual series? The answer seems obvious to me: a careful exercise of the gaze, which can lead to that ‘emission of the eye’ the poet Ștefan Augustin Doinaş wrote about: ‘my gaze is fire and the road/suddenly takes fire/my gaze begs and the ashes/change back into a road’. For the painter, ‘to render the pure expression of the pictorial space represented by the monochrome, rediscovering the certainty of symmetry/asymmetry in opposition to the unpredictable becoming of the spot’ seems fundamental.
In the LOT cycle (light, transparency, opacity), created during this spring, Dana Constantin experiments with the expressive possibilities of oil painting, combined with the surprising effects of collage. The visual synthesis between appearance and essence is mediated by the abstract reflection between two privileged elements: the Surface and the Line, which derive from the direct observation of the rhythm set by the structures existing in nature. The exciting dialogue with the natural forms has now reached a happy conclusion expressed in the profound exploration of the internal architecture of form: interpreted in a formalistic key, it recalls the concept of ‘architectonic setting’ formulated in 1893 by Adolf von Hildebrand, for whom an artwork is composed of spatial forms in which nature is revealed and who stated that ‘the problems of form arising from the architectonic setting of a work do not derive directly from nature but are exclusively artistic.’ In Dana Constantin’s case, as she herself confesses, the essence lies in ‘the formal and architectonic concern with nature’s creative power’.
LOT is, at this moment, the synthesis of all the form-related concerns that have accompanied Dana Constantin in her artistic journey from the purification of the vegetal allusions to the chromatic structures dominated by rigid lines and the recovery of an organic–abstracting-rendering dimension.The artist keeps looking at reality with concentration, to discover the essence beyond the appearance. Or, to quote the poet Ştefan Augustin Doinaş again: ‘a magical gaze/a radiating eye/a momentary stay/of the magic spell’.
Curator: Ruxandra Demetrescu