Opening: 22 October | 12:30 – ARCUB, Coloane Hall
The exhibition can be visited as following:
20-30 October 2023, between 10:00 and 18:00.
”Paint – impulses, it’s thanks to this mixed word that Oana Maria Calaj claims the energy that defines her plastic gesture. It’s not a meditation, but rather an explicit impulse, a dynamic force, an intense call to be manifested within her artworks. The artworks that can be associated with the complex echoes of history, cultural footprints, personal memory. Paint – impulses of an artist that says no to nothing and accepts the impurity of an era, communicated in her vertiginous confusion. We look at them and see characters, situations, but most importantly how they seduce the underground current that animates them. Here’s the expression of a hectic conglomerate that denies the unity in order to afirm and embrace the diversity of the world.” (George Banu)
Curator: Oana Maria Cajal
Presents: Marina Constantinescu
With the help of: National Theatre Festival and ARCUB
On Oana Maria Calaj, George Banu says: ”The artworks of Oana Calaj capture the tension between aggressive linework and fast colours. They convey a dialogue of vivid contrasts, untamed. But sometimes they interfere here and there with nostalgic nuances, memories and remembrance – the accents that temper down this primordial, intense, vital and memorable conflict.”
”Recently, Biță sent me an imagine that charmed me instantly.
A completely black screen on which the full moon, an enigmatic effigy, is simultaneously mirror
and implacable reflector, a predestined convergence point of our cosmic longings.
Biță indicated it as «a summernight dream».
During the years of our long lasting childhood friendship I have discovered that every message from Biță hides a veiled invitation to wander. A calling I don’t always feel inspired to answer to. The words and images he sends me excite me just as mysterious highlights hidden within the backrooms of life, on the initiation journey to the center of our Self, at Curtain Frontier. It’s where memories combine with a harrowing humility, where ancestral scenery turns to stealthy fragments of dust, theatrical objects of longing, the whispers of a prompter, all lost in the text of Prospero. It’s where Majnun eternally yearns to catch up with us, in the spotlight of scattered nostalgia. It’s where we come alive again on the wings of friendship and memory from beneath the modern apocalyptic ashes.
It’s the place where I waited for Biță a hundred years before today, perched on the old chestnut tree at the gate of my childhood.
I waited for him to show up on his bike, back from Buzău while time passed him at the speed wind blew away the soft beguiling scarf he stills wore, each time with the same ineffable elegance, always tying and untying his hesitancies just the same. As he arrived, he smiled with exhaustion, tightened his belt a couple times and cast a shadow on the chestnut tree for the eternity of a second. It embodied «the past to be» within the passing glimpse of an intimate and discrete allusion of what «will come to be».
The night curtain inside the image a received from Biță suddenly gets animated by the spell of hope, by the fissure of moonlight cast on my face or the irresistible white page on which the dreams Biță is made of now summon their embodiment.” (Oana Maria Cajal. 9 September 2019, Bucharest)
Oana Maria Cajal is an acclaimed playwriter, scriptwriter, plastic artist and poet. She is licensed by the Bucharest Theatre and Cinematography Institute. In 1980 she emigrated to USA thank to an American Theatre Critics Association scholarship. Oana Cajal has an MA in Playwriting at the University of California San Diego. Her first performance, East European Tetralogy, was nominated as Best Play of The Year by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle. Most of her theatre plays were successfully produced on all North America.
”The Last Pact (A Theatre Enigma)” won the Best Play of The Year in 2011. Her feature film screenplay ”The White Gate” was nominated as Best Screen Play at the Gopo Awards in 2015.
Oana got back into graphic arts starting with the paint poems volume ”Solenodon” and the series of painting exhibitions titled ”Posters for Unwritten Plays”.
She had multiple personal exhibitions in Canada, Romania and the USA.
To her, theatre and visual arts, as well as the image and the word were always connected by default.
Oana Maria Cajal is the alumna of New Dramatists in New York, received a Fullbright and a NEA (National Endowment for The Arts) scholarship, is a member of Dramatists Guild of America, Playwrights Guild of Canada, The Theater Union of Romania (UNITER), The Writers Union of Romania (USR), The Cinematographers Union of Romania (UCIN), The Plastic Artists Union (UAP), Multimedia.
Oana Maria Cajal este alumna a New Dramatists din New York, a primit bursele Fulbright și NEA (National Endowment for The Arts), este membră a Dramatists Guild of America, Playwrights Guild of Canada, Uniunea Teatrală din România (UNITER), Uniunea Scriitorilor din România (USR), Uniunea Cineaștilor din România (UCIN) și Uniunea Artiștilor Plastici (UAP), Multimedia.
(Paint-Impulses / New Media Art)
Video: Portraits of At Curtain Frontier
