Home [ENG] / Acasă [RO]
Curator: Veronica Toma
From November 9 – November 23, 2023
Casa cu iederă, Timișoara, Romania
The courage to assume total sincerity, to engage in an exercise of authenticity, represents for the artist and individual Nora Blaj a sine qua non condition for engaging in the act of creation. This positioning and emotional disposition provide total liberation and freedom of plastic expression, which thus becomes generative, and fruitful; gesturality plays an important role in the economy of the techniques involved.
Joy, exuberance, and euphoria are tempered by poetic zones, serenity, and counterbalance to the inner turmoil poured onto the canvas. This balance is not about control, but about emotional maturity, the courage to contemplate oneself in a mirror, liberated from the fear of one’s reflection, a sign of healing and reconciliation with oneself.
Nora Blaj’s painting is a form of exorcism. It brings to the surface a version of the world stored by the artist and rendered in all its poetic beauty. Together with borrowed objects and narratives – letters, images, textiles, photographs – Nora’s works – a kaleidoscope of emotions, feelings, falls, and spectacular returns – translate a history of human fragility that thus receives a poetic-pictorial reflection and translation.
Nora Blaj’s art is both an exploration and a retrieval of memory. Gaps and lapses are filled in by imagination which thus outlines and clarifies a potential family story. Real but incomplete stories find a conclusion in the artistic gesture. Memory and nostalgia are the protagonists of these narratives, realms of the imaginary, lost in time and space, with obscure areas that are recovered by dreaming. Personal geographies intertwine with those of family members, creating possible stories and narratives. In the physical space of painting, this process is achieved through the successive arrangement of layers that unveil, literally and figuratively, an affective history triggered either by the personal object or by the anonymous one, borrowed and/or recovered and integrated into the context of the work.
The stages of creation alternate with periods of calm, contemplation, accumulation, and assimilation of the spectacle of the world, which then flows like a tumult, an uninterrupted flux through successive overlays and juxtapositions, guided however by an intuition of the mature artist’s gesture controlling the creative process.
The exhibition “Acasă” (Home), speaks, as always in Nora Blaj’s case, not about a geography with a precise location, but about a state, because Nora’s home is within her where tranquility and restlessness intertwine and from where one can transpose into a state of grace, that is, into painting.
Veronica Toma, curator of the exhibition Acasă (Home) by Nora Blaj
Photo credits: Daliana Iacobescu
