I was born in 1971, on the 16^th of March, under the sign of Pisces, being quite determined ever since I was a child. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I always said I wanted to be a teacher. So I became one. But only for 6 years, during which time children taught me how to be a child again, how to be free, and paint. After the graduation of a fashion design college in 1993, I felt I wanted more, so I enrolled at the Fine Arts Faculty.

After two years of not learning a thing, the replacement of a teacher changed everything. I learned to laugh. I was followed by the ideal, abstract patterns of things and events, and their long, tall shapes cut down to a mysterious simplicity, unchanged every time. In my works, I try to preserve this permanent connection between things and their patterns. This way, I can gradually observe and dream about the same reality in which you need plenty of silence and stillness to achieve a balance between yourself and your surroundings.

I graduated in 2000 with the intention to repeat a year. I was truly enjoying it. After Radu was born, I went through a period of accumulating and then I just worked and worked. My daughter, Maria, whetted my appetite for painting even more; for me, motherhood meant fulfilment and it made me aware of a number of things. And then again, painting. Not even on a constant basis. Painting. I live inside it.

Nora Blaj is an exploratory artist. With the help of colours, graphic signs, writing, and inserts of all kinds, she brings to the surface of her own works an interior geometry which is subjective, ontological. The equations of the images inside the frames seem to have a simple solution for the viewers. When you look at them, the answer seems to come naturally: ‘yes, I like them’.

However, the tasteful visual impact of Nora’s compositions is also due to their vital interior substance. Her works have a heart. She actually paints answers to humanity’s deep questions, and we instantly like them because we recognize many of these answers as our own. Right here, at your disposal, lies a journal that may seem impersonal (as abstract art appears to be, in most cases). But if we look closer, we discover the threads of a story written in the first person, a story of the self. A story about plunging into darkness and the light of life. Nora brings the light to the surface, whether it is red, yellow, or orange, depending where her personal sun is: at sunrise, dusk, or noon.

 

Robert Șerban, Nora Blaj’s Personal Sun

 

Nora Blaj is the lucid, temperamental type of artist. If there is something about her painting that convinces me, it has to be this eruptive energy of saturated chromatic densities, which exalts visual excitation all the way to paroxysm. But also the confessive-interrogative refluxes, a sign of sensory relaxation, which positions her in the abstract or conceptual areas of painting.

 

Corneliu Antim