Viorica Iacob’s Exhibition “Earth and Waves”, open from November 4th to December 3rd, 2014, included paintings, graphics and tapestry in a selection with manifestly retrospective character, since the first work on the pictures rails of Senso Gallery was made in 1972, the last in 2012.
Viorica Iacob graduated “Nicolae Grigorescu” Institute of Fine Arts, the 1962 series of graduates, class of Professor Maria Buescu. Member of UAP, the artist also graduated the Faculty of Decorative Art, while at the same time she studied painting. Since the 1960s, she has been a constant presence in painting, decorative and tapestry exhibitions in the country and abroad.
The opening speech of the exhibition was delivered by Doina Pauleanu PhD, art critic and manager of Constanta Art Museum.
“The works in the exhibition are dedicated to both the tellurium and the aquatic areas, among which there are many correspondents, the most important of which is related to the altitude of the artist’s eye, allowing the image to show complex panoramas in a perspective called, long before the emergence of modern devices that allowed such a view, the bird’s eye view (à vol d’oiseau), at the time only a scientific combination of real observations and imagined elements that people had hoped since the dawn of civilisations. It is, in fact, a catoptric view, according to the terminology proposed during the late Renaissance and Mannerism by Gian Battista Lomazzo among others (who, in Trattato della pittura, published in Milan in 1584, distinguishes three types of perspective constructions at the level of the horizon: the optic view – frontal, anoptric – bottom-up and the catoptric – top-down against this line); the scientific knowledge (from where, most of the times, the idea of a fraternal cosmos, comprehensible, derives) can contribute to the adoption of such a panoramic vision (according to the researchers in the field), the omniscient eye, the utopian view, the social dimension of the prestige, the clarity or picturesque of the image
Seen from above, up in the skies, as the artist often did in her journeys (and composition Kites above the Seaof 1997 confirms the altitude signalled, instituting a hierarchical perspective, in which the objects close to the eye are larger than the corresponding surfaces of water or shore), the storms that deviate on the Black Sea coast, originally called – as historian Strabo shows – Pontus Axeinos (unfriendly sea), take the form of motion that shifts the lines the thrills conveyed by Viorica Iacob’s works with the suggestion of the abyss does not make reference to the romantic props of naval disaster or huge waves, but only upset the spatial rhythms unfolding through predictable appearance of a non-figuratively nucleus of centripetal function –Black Sea , oil on canvas, 1997, gouache from 2000, 2001, 2010. In such cases, horizontality – which is a characteristic of these images, regardless of the figurative pretence, size, form or field of the art – painting, graphics or tapestry – seems temporarily threatened; the linear network, in continuous expansion, restores the dominant vision without respite. There are also limit situations where coloured shapes and inserts are gradually reduced, the ratio between lighted and shaded surfaces becomes just a suggestion – Ploughed Land, undated gouache, and the lines capture, with tendrils, the entire surface – Ploughed Land, gouaches from 1987 to 1994″. – Doina Pauleanu PhD.
This event was conducted with the support of Catena Group, through Catena for Art Program, and the Fildas Art Foundation.
