Ana Maria Panaitescu works predominantly in mixed media, in proximity to formal boundaries. It is increasingly difficult to assert what remains in her creations through a pure definition: what is a painting, what is a textile or sculpture, collage or installation, music or interstice between polyphony and silence. We are talking about demarcations of borders, about uniqueness and diversity.
Ana-Maria Panaitescu—a case apart. Through a blessedly minimalist aesthetic which she has honed over a long time, with meticulousness, know-how also through tenacious craftsmanship, the artist reinvents Byzantine and post-Byzantine plastic art. Although Byzantine visual art plainly abhors three-dimensionality, Ana-Maria Panaitescu proposes a kind of “Mépla”, which convinces us that the source of her inspiration is not necessarily the fresco or the icon, but the space shaped by funeral stones, stucco work, embroidery and embossing, all the elements that make the dogmatic transition from East to West sweeter, smoother, more acceptable.
Part of the generation of painters shaped by the Bucharest University of Art in the postcommunist era, Ana-Maria Panaitescu enriches through her creation the minimalist style. The artist is not preoccupied by the diversity of means to express the living world, the dizzying and appetizing richness of shapes, but by a unique motif. This she passionately studies in her works, attempting to penetrate its hidden meaning beyond its material surface. Because every thing has a “husk” and a “core,” Ana Maria Panaitescu tries to peel away the husk.
Starting from mysticism and spirituality, Ana-Maria’s works amaze through the simplicity of forms and through homogeneity. She approaches art through several mediums (painting, textile, collage). The cup and the angel are key elements that bring her oeuvre to life and are transposed in surprising techniques. Paintings of columns and ceremonial cups of different sizes, resembling the Greek columns of ancient temples, seem to sustain an artistic dialogue about content. Although ceremonial cups are often related to offering or sacrifice, in the artist’s creations, the emptiness is that which surprises—this neutral breathing space, a necessary void in the daily clamor. This artistic dialogue is maintained also in the assemblage works, where the transition toward wings happens in stages, at the level of texture and form, in order later to turn into large-scale textile angels, with wings that come like an embrace charged with emotion.
