Opening: 22 October | 12:30 \u2013 ARCUB, Coloane Hall<\/strong><\/p>\n The exhibition can be visited as following:<\/p>\n 20-30 October 2023, between 10:00 and 18:00.<\/p>\n<\/div> <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div> Curator: Oana Maria Cajal<\/strong><\/p>\n Presents: Marina Constantinescu<\/strong><\/p>\n With the help of: National Theatre Festival <\/strong>and\u00a0ARCUB<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div> On Oana Maria Calaj,\u00a0George Banu\u00a0<\/strong>says: \u201dThe 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 \u2013\u00a0the accents that temper down this primordial, intense, vital and memorable conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201dRecently, Bi\u021b\u0103 sent me an imagine that charmed me instantly.<\/p>\n A completely black screen on which the full moon, an enigmatic effigy, is simultaneously mirror<\/p>\n and implacable reflector, a predestined convergence point of our cosmic longings.<\/p>\n Bi\u021b\u0103 indicated it as \u00aba summernight dream\u00bb.<\/p>\n During the years of our long lasting childhood friendship I have discovered that every message from Bi\u021b\u0103 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.<\/p>\n It’s the place where I waited for Bi\u021b\u0103 a hundred years before today, perched on the old chestnut tree at the gate of my childhood.<\/p>\n I waited for him to show up on his bike, back from Buz\u0103u 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 \u00abthe past to be\u00bb within the passing glimpse of an intimate and discrete allusion of what \u00abwill come to be\u00bb.<\/p>\n The night curtain inside the image a received from Bi\u021b\u0103 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 Bi\u021b\u0103 is made of now summon their embodiment.\u201d (Oana Maria Cajal. 9 September 2019, Bucharest)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fnt.ro\/2023\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/george-banu.jpg\")
\n<\/div>\u201dPaint <\/em>\u2013 impulses, <\/em>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 <\/em>\u2013 impulses\u00a0<\/em>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.\u201d (George Banu)<\/h3>\n<\/div>