Artist Statement

Beyond the pedagogical basis of Flora's approach lies a vocation as a plein-air painter and the shared joy of painting in and from nature, which is becoming increasingly rare today (almost a curiosity for the contemporary art consumer). "It is only with the heart that one can see clearly. The essence of things cannot be seen with the eyes," wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And Flora puts her heart to work. Her sunsets dissolve the boundary between sky and earth, with light being the element of symbiosis between the two, not of separation. The agony of the sun is captured in different places, in different contexts, and its depiction on canvas is not illustrative-impressionistic, as a casual glance might hastily conclude, but rather melting pots containing a pictorial hermeneutics of space and time. Because, as I said, the artist explores with her eyes and her brush, she does not just see and place colors. She is an alchemist, and one who knows how and what to look for in order to find.

Each work reveals a mysterious universe through the spectacular colors, the thick brushstrokes with luminous iridescence, and the subtle details. Regardless of where they take us, the artist's works are a free expression of inner emotions that can be conveyed on canvas using lines, shapes, colors, and texture. The lines of force in the compositions draw our attention to the magic around us. The use of darkness in the clouds or sky enhances the intensity of the image. Highly textured, sometimes very detailed, sometimes abstract, Flora's landscapes are a personal introspection through which she interacts with the viewer. Through juxtaposition of dark and subtle strokes, the works create delicate effects of intertwining.

A mindful journey through Flora's sunsets can be equivalent—for viewers capable of renewing their cultural memory and enhancing their spiritual one—to a rite of passage.

For Flora Raducan, her studious and research-oriented concern for the subtle issues of easel painting is not merely an experimental whim. Starting from the aesthetic foundations of Velázquez, Cézanne, and Bacon, but also from the questions raised by her own mentor during her student years, the painter Constantin Flondor, the artist quickly articulated a well-defined universe of concerns, which she explores with constant passion and professionalism. It is mainly about the ways of dissociating light flows in obscure environments, where forms are absorbed, at least apparently, into nothingness, and where shadows amplify the corporality of any photonic emission. Figuratively speaking, it is an attempt to approach the problems of physics and wave mechanics through metaphysical poetics. A subtle relationship between the actual universe and its surreal projection, between the objective, perceptible world and the ethereal one shaped by the art instruments.

Flora Raducan explores an ambiguous and mysterious world, placed on the edge between the amorphous and the form in its full conceiving process.

Obviously, Flora represents, through her continuous submersion in the damp shadows of matter, the universe of femininity and sublunar regime. But it is precisely this apparent clarity that carries a spectacular paradox: through her irrepressible energy and determined will to introduce the viewer into a world in full process of structuring, Flora acquires the attributes of a founding and virile consciousness.

Flora Raducan argues a fundamental truth: namely, that artistic expression is by no means a simple reflex of exuberant narcissism, but a rigorous commentary on the profound unity of the world and its symbolic coherence.