Tree Line / Doina Simionescu / In Memoriam

“Doina Simionescu was an elegant presence. ”

Doina Simionescu

Curator: Liviana Dan

November 11, 2016 – January 8, 2017

Anca Poterașu Gallery, Bucharest

Doina Simionescu was an elegant presence. The way she lived, the way she dressed and dined, the way she talked and spent her private time, the way she furnished her studio, her attempt to organize her garden and her approach to traveling, these all make the Doina Simionescu style. 

She lived a bohemian life with little comfort. She loved black chocolate, the Armani type of luxury, books and expensive paper. She was having oriental nostalgia and was always in search of a new place, a new manner of work. She had learnt from the Chinese attitude that one is in need of three things in order to keep on drawing: the hand, the eye and the heart.

“She was fastened to minimalism, using a gestural abstraction with hard edges and tender surfaces. She practiced an evanescent communication, infinitely sophisticated.”

Doina Simionescu created a kind of visual journal. Fresh – delicate – inventive. A passage to say that the eye has an extreme pleasure ‘sur le motif’, that can also be fulfilled in its proximity. Doina Simionescu brings things closer and makes them incredibly more interesting. ‘The blossom lay like snow’. Sometimes her art emits light. For the visual journal she used a new type of description. She had chosen the particular time of day, the summer morning, the quality of the air, the charcoal shadow of the silhouettes, emotion in a fluid form / ‘I hear the light’… ‘this is a very good line’… the performative power of drawing. 

For Doina Simionescu, drawing was more than just a line of thought, it was a moment in life. The drawing composes her artwork following a liquid metaphor and a type of intense continuity. The drawing follows a lyrical geometry, dictated by the aesthetics of silence. It is an exercise of ascetic value. An ecological asceticism. An imaginative behavior for what one can do. 

The rigor of drawing determines Doina Simionescu to find an emergency-based approach. Doina Simionescu finds a place / Gruiu / and a natural, direct world. Which travels in and out of the photograph. Photography as a free theoretical zone. Starting with this place, photography certifies the involvement of the facts and the intensity of images. Doina Simionescu does not have to draw anymore. There is a dimension behind the speech even before the photograph. There are many other discursive elements after the photograph. 

Doina Simionescu composes a garden for herself / a new oeuvre in fact / of silence and isolation. We remark the control over structure, the consideration of every answer, the absence of ordinary realization. The line traces a map of power. There is a spiritual authority and a truth filled with arguments. There is the highest distinction for drawing / Miro / received by Doina, there are her happy artworks scattered throughout the world, there are now sequestered artworks in a trial, and there have been two raffia bags with plenty of secondary material for this exhibition.

You can download the curatorial text below.