ABOUT
LIVIU TUDOR SAMOILA – BUCHAREST
“Mara Diaconu shows an absolutely unique personality. It is the merit of the generosity with which she exhibits her dream on the canvas using flamboyant colours, of the composition’s force of expression, completed with an intense chromatic sensitivity.
The works, whether they are on the threshold between known and unknown, figurative and nonfigurative, they all have the air of mystery and strength at the same time; they are all born from the knowledge of transforming, almost simultaneously, the chromatic into sound and the work into a chromatic murmur, a chromatic explosion.
Each work takes form from the gesture, from the touch, from the concreteness up to suggestion and they all give to the works the air of mystery. At the border between seen and unseen, possible and impossible, the poetic concreteness stands up when it suggests a real thing, painted and highlighted by the red-orange leitmotif and gains tenderness, high lyricism when it discovers the beauty of a woman’s body, a possible interpretation of what the human body means.
The art of making from the force and the lyricism one plastic gesture of the artistic perfection is materialized by Mara Diaconu in the ‘Corida’ series, where she brings, both in the drawing and in the forms suggestion, the colour that defines herself perfectly and makes her unique.”
“The bright colour, maybe too clean and too bright, shows an acute feminine sensitivity. In the drawing, the calligraphy of a hand, the cut of a semi profile, the difficulty of an anatomical raccourci, objects captured in the most various perspective angles, evidence the qualities of a practiced eye, which can see. And the modulations of the line, when graceful, when severe, when subtle, when firm, prove that the hand knows to submit to his dictation.”
VIRGIL POLEACU – PITESTI“Expansive and flashing, the painting of Mara Diaconu has something of Hartung’s gestural rapidity, but without his severe sterility with strict formal constraints, being distinguished by the chromatic prodigality and the unpredictable freedom of the touches. They are structured and defined by large, energetic deployments, emancipated from the tutelage of normative constraints.
We are suggested possible reconsiderations of the contingent real, being operated mutations of the common plastic place – static nature – landscape, portrait – in rarefied areas with intense fluorescent iridescences, where the materiality of the objects are transferred in parallel existences, controlled by an enigmatic center of gravity. Effervescent and directly seductive, without trendiness but without pedantry also, the art of Mara Diaconu has the natural authenticity of the values acquired from a privileged Eucharist.”
ION PANTILIE – PITESTI“Trying to avoid being subjective (as if it could be otherwise) you risk a cold speech, without the chromatic warmth released by the hypothetical roads built with nerve and love by Mara Diaconu. The exhibition, opened in the lobby of the Rectorate of the University of Pitesti, promises a beautiful and lasting friendship between two cultural institutions. This statement is required to be argued, at least through the efforts of the two forms of training for the contemporary life, where if you don’t have a system of communication, you don’t find your place. The art is a form of communication, which involves means of specific languages. I am sorry if, nowadays, anyone still believes the theory that the art is fun, delight. No. It is a way of approaching a problem hard to accept sometimes. How easy would it be to stick on the surface of the things, of the phenomena, right? We are frightened by the idea that an artist ‘challenges’ us and proposes to us other ‘ways’ than those followed for so many years. But he, the creator of hypothetical landscapes, flowers, compositions or portraits, only wants a dialogue with us, his friends, those who live together in the same space and time. The cymas of the University of Pitesti propose to us four times – meditation zones of the world here, next to us, but which we oh! – we see it in ‘shell’, superficial and neutral in terms of feeling. Mara Diaconu creates (and offers that with generosity) starting from the structures that live in the waters and on their banks, creates forms not absolutely new, but rather forms in another kind of movement, relationship and chromatic context. Her illustrator profession doesn’t stop her to ‘boil’ these forms either to simmer sepia, shadows and lights, or in a tumultuous assembly of orange, red and their close combinations. She fictionally takes the brush to moving zones, so that suddenly she throws flames full of concreteness and frankness, promising for that ‘beyond’ hidden from the immediate reality. Fine intellectual, she proposes to herself (and she proposes to us) to approach themes worthy of the elites. She runs away from everything vulgar and she even has a deep fear of not being interpreted as such none of her compositions.”
IOANA ZINELLI – LISBON, PORTUGAL, NOVEMBER 2003“Mara Diaconu approaches with great exuberance various themes of the figurative painting, being drawn, generally, by the observation of the nature and, alike, of the nude.
Classic themes such as still life, landscape, compositions with zoomorphic and vegetal elements, with characters, are interpreted and translated into explosive chromatic combinations, as the artist’s desire is to capture and immortalize the gesture, the time or the moment.
The works of Mara Diaconu, in fact elaborated and complex, seem to be some sketches of a remarkable freshness and spontaneity.
The painter prefers the cold – warm contrast of red and blue, dominant colours that are found almost as a common denominator in her work and which, moreover, offer to the artist’s work the stamp of originality.
The artist’s creations are stain, gesture, line, depth, free touch, intense feeling of the life and its most common moments. The capture of the existence’s moments, of the nature’s elements always rediscovered, reveals a great force of expression.
The juxtaposition of different surfaces of colour – diverse as gesture and expression – allows to the artist to juggle with the technique from the opaque and paste to the transparency of the watercolour, creating elaborated compositions of a great artistic force.”