The Queen's Dream – Paula Craioveanu
July 19- August 4, 2024
Pelișor Castle hosts an author's exhibition entitled "The Queen's Dream" - 24 paintings signed by Paula Craioveanu. The opening will take place on Friday, July 19, 2024, at 1 p.m.
Presented by art historian and journalist Liliana Popa.
Paula Craioveanu is a visual artist and architect, member of the Union of Fine Artists, graduate of the Ion Mincu University of Architecture, Doctor in Visual Arts of the University of Arts Bucharest. Paula Craioveanu is represented by art galleries in New York and Los Angeles, and her works are in collections in the country and abroad.
Paula Craioveanu
www.cpaula.com
“I painted the first portrait of Queen Mary in 2006. It is a more sober portrait inspired by the official portraits of the Queen. This year in 2024, I painted a new portrait of the Queen especially for this exhibition, this time wanting to highlight the artistic side of Queen Mary, her passion for art. The Queen painted, wrote memoirs, fairy tales, loved lilies, symbolist art, 1900 art. In this year's portrait, the figure is surrounded by vines, a symbol of the Art Nouveau style, and lilies, on a purple background – her favorite color. One of the novels written by Queen Mary is even called “The Lily of Life” – a fairy tale, a love story.
The exhibition includes a total of 24 works, created in various stages, works representative of my searches and concerns over the last 20 years in the field of painting - painted interiors, windows, landscapes from Balchik and works from the neo-mythology series and last but not least, the portraits of the queen.
The interiors are influenced by my architectural studies, the oldest interior is from 2004, and the most recent from this year. My paintings are scenographies inspired by historical interiors, which have evolved in various directions, some of them constituting a background for characters, classic interiors seen through filters of light and strong colors, or windows in different styles to which I have added vegetal juxtapositions or perspective overlays. An object such as the stylish armchair comes to life through color. Historical references are brought into the contemporary space, using fresh colors and bright, vivid shadows, which have the power to touch a sensitive chord. The atmosphere created by the interiors with classic accents and quotes, invites dreaming, meditation.
The works are a series of states, searches, meditations. The exhibition is a tribute to Queen Maria, a great promoter of the arts, but also a true diplomat, a sensitive and strong woman, to whom we owe so much. I invite you to see the exhibition and visit the museum with its wonderful rooms and art objects.”
'A creator of beauty, attracted by the evolution of forms and lights as a spectacle through the ability to engage diaphanously in nature, an apparent realism, sometimes playful, sometimes meditative and tightrope-walking, the painter Paula Craioveanu.
The painting, the inspired graphics, the strong but also their finesse, the play between decorative, figurative and pictorial make you stop in front of each work and wonder where, in what season he created it....
Paula Craioveanu is one of the visual artists who paints every day… Her plastic dialogue is clear, a spectacle of beauty, regardless of whether it is a message, portrait or still life. Some works seem repetitive returns, but they are her own reevaluations over time. The alternation of tones, planes, coloristic practices, with notes of great brightness, brings notes of balance, thanks to the timed coloristic interventions.
Through the artist's concreteness and plasticity, but also through her gift for color, her compositions have verbosity.
The common denominator is DRAWING. As in the Renaissance, an artist who masters drawing can be a good painter, sculptor. Paula Craioveanu passes, with great finesse, from classicism to modernism and does it undoubtedly beautifully.
The artist allows herself to move from figurative to non-figurative, the approach through which the artist realizes the proposed theme – the architectural environment and the eternal feminine – denotes artistic intelligence and a hand and mind that master the drawing.
The geometrization of the portrait does not bother, the author has real artistic authority.
The artist's personality is already clear, her inclination towards portrait or landscape realism crossing various registers of color and brightness with great refinement.
In Paula Craioveanu there is a syncretism of the arts, painting and architecture have many points of contact, so the fields are congeneric, related. IN MEDIAS REX as Horace said, in essence, there are rare alterities, antonyms. Let us remember that Michelangelo and Rafael Sanzio were chief architects of Rome.
Her seemingly spontaneous painting is structured on a rigorous plastic composition, even if your gaze is first drawn to the spontaneous, fluid play and line.
Paula Craioveanu is an architect, a graduate of the University of Architecture of Bucharest (2000) and a Doctor in Visual Arts, of the University of Arts of Bucharest (2013). Member of the Order of Architects of Romania, Bucharest branch, and of the Union of Fine Artists of Romania.
Liliana Popa
art historian