A Square Apart, 8 April- 28 April 2021, The Palace of Parliament, Bucharest, Romania

Laura Niculescu & Adrian Dica, A Square Apart

Text by Diana Andrei for the exhibition A Square Apart

The exhibition joins works of two young painters, Adrian Dica and Laura Niculescu, known for their solo and collective exhibitions in Bucharest and other European capitals.
Their works are placed face to face in a dialogue between two bodies of works in becoming for almost two years, since their last personal exhibitions. A few paintings are for each artist milestones of the old and new artistic search. The spiritual bridges born between their works form a powerful structure of elements interrelated. One dimension is the physical one and by folding equally and vertically we get the the spiritual one, and then by continuous folding a multidimensional space arises and that’s how the name of the exhibition was born. Apart is not about separation, is about relating in a structure of elements that generates a conversational space.
Both projects are born from a tension similar to the one of a person who, caught in a flying airplane or in a situation that he cannot control, starts to reevaluate. The boundaries and connections with the old landscape become temporary null and obsolete in their works, everything is revalued, recomposed and distilled until space and time disappears.
Niculescu’s paintings are a continuation of the “Less is more” series, going deeper beyond unnecessary details through a moral and ethical view (reminding of the dry desert or the frozen lonely north) in a spiritual search for authenticity and freedom. From the first works of this series, facades are uncovered, structures are demolished, limits disappear, the basement is erased, time fades away. The perspective becomes a sketch, the main elements are extracted, reinterpreted and then in successive stages resynthesized as spiritual milestones, until the memory of an old photo is condensed and poured in pure geometrical suspended elements (point, line, rectangle).
Space is represented in her figurative works in a classical perspective, where the debris of nature is eliminated, while differences and distances between objects are kept and synthesized. Composition is static with one or two centers of interest, the strong tonal value and the suspended geometrical element. In some works, the rectangles are the center of interest. Details are meant to be completely and definitively erased.
Formal compositional similarities to the Egyptian and Byzantine painting are an attempt to erase the limitations of time, while the technique rejects the excessive materiality of paint paste and lots of unnecessary overlayers in an attempt to erase the limitations of space, thus obtaining the essence, the truth.

Back