Artist: Maria Stoica
Title: CLUJ afterSCHOOL: On the Curator–Artist Dichotomy // A World Slightly Elsewhere
Curator: Xenia Tinca
Venue: Sabot Gallery, Cluj Napoca
Photos: YAP Studio
There are worlds that do not reveal themselves through abrupt assertion but through a gradual gliding, through a subtle shift in the perception (or definition) of reality. These are worlds—visual, emotional, and dreamlike at the same time—that do not impose themselves, but insinuate themselves into the fabric of the real; they do not overwhelm like eruptions, but rather envelop like emanations of a vibrant and delicate creative imagination. They are worlds constructed as though they were an echo of a parallel dimension, adjacent to the realm of the visible commonplace, and yet radically distinct from it. Maria Stoica is an artist who builds her pictorial universe in such imaginative crevices and topological interstices: a visual world inhabited by seemingly familiar objects that nonetheless lose their usual, gravitational docility and yield to deconstruction and reconstruction under the diffuse action of the imaginative force field, in ways reminiscent of the entities that populate the light of a dream just beginning.
The exhibition A World Slightly Elsewhere proposes a dynamic incursion into this elegantly original, poetic territory, delicate and somewhat bizarre, yet relatable for the one who commits to exploration. In Maria Stoica’s world, objects keep their shape but change their logic, spaces remain recognizable, but are traversed by a captivating light—implausible, yet convincing; reality seems to reflect upon itself, only to reorder itself anew.
Maria Stoica’s artistic process is fundamentally shaped by a sustained tension between recognition and wonder, between the familiar and visual exotism, between description and vivification. Everyday objects—a chair, a cup, the corner of a table, a window shutter, the interior of a room—are displaced from their usual, habitual inertia and endowed with a strange vibration: this is not about generating a melancholic atmosphere, but rather about a peaceful yet decisive transfer of perception and emotional temperature from the register of the descriptive to that of the dreamlike. The banal thus becomes animated, reinvigorated and reinvigorating, restless and vaguely unsettling; the works are not governed by anxiety or permeated by ghosts, but are animated by a certain tremor, while, from behind a line, a volute, or a distorted corner, you might expect one of Cortázar’s cronopios to appear.
Color plays an essential role in this process. For the artist, color is not merely a tool of representation: its simultaneously energetic and delicate manipulation is a form of thought and emotional expression. Painterly pigment operates not so much descriptively as affectively; it does not merely outline forms, but generates states. The hues are chosen with an intuitive sensitivity that depends more on visceral perception than on the requirements of a rational, impersonal chromatics. Maria Stoica uses color as an organizing principle that nonetheless allows itself sensuous, playful liberties.
The works in A World Slightly Elsewhere are the outcome of recent explorations into the expressive potential of watercolor and oil pastel on paper, whose inherent and rather charming fragility augments the dynamic immediacy of the pieces. The encounter of these two registers of materiality—watercolor and pastel—one ethereal, the other velvety and unctuous, delineates the framework of a dialogue between the subtleties of evanescence and textural richness. The large-scale works are suspended, detached from the convention of the frame, offering themselves as vulnerable and imposing at the same time. They function as double gates—indeed, portals—granting access to a space-time of imagination, to a “land of mirrors” where everything resembles the known world but is governed by different rules, invented by an Alice who does not flee from reality but reconfigures it, exploring its folds and hidden possibilities.
Overall, Maria Stoica’s art—particularly as showcased in A World Slightly Elsewhere—reveals itself as an emergent expression of a tension, firmly embraced and delicately mastered by the artist, between structure and flux, as the emanation of the tectonics of a liminal space located on the sometimes imprecise frontier between the visible and the imaginary. Her painting is, more than anything, an art of perpetually incomplete metamorphosis and, by virtue of this very quality, all the more fascinating, visually magnetic, and paradoxically liberating. (exhibition text by Xenia Tinca)