Those who visit the National Museum of Art Timisoara (MNArT) until the end of July will discover a part of Romania's history, from the end of the interwar period and what followed until close to the present.
A Great Romania torn apart by the Second World War, a Chernivtsi that overnight was no longer part of the Kingdom of Romania, a 12-year-old girl, Virginia Baz Baroiu, in love with music and who wanted to become an opera soloist on the great international stages, but who, taking the path of exile with her family, will have to give up this dream. A child for whom home was never again what it had been before, always looking for a place called "home": the train, Slatina beyond the newly drawn borders, the Bucharest of the student years where she studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, then Timisoara. She has been living for over six decades in the city on the Bega, in which she found many architectural similarities with what she had left in Bucovina, but also in the behavior of the people - warm, kind, welcoming, sincere, educated.
In her retreats, Virginia Baz Baroiu would talk a lot with God, and between Heaven and Earth she often built an island of colors, suspended, imaginary, of peace, of tranquility, that home she no longer had.
And thus she created a link, in watercolors, from which the exhibition "Sky, Earth and the Word" was born - a retrospective Virginia Baz Baroiu Baz, recently opened at MNArT, which contains 200 works depicting cities, chains of people, lots of nature, urban landscapes and churches
"The works of Virginia Baz Baroiu, a plastic artist who was born in Chernivtsi, in 1932, graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest (1957), and as of 1958 settled in Timisoara, is on display in the museum. What she painted in her 70 years of artistic activity is exhibited here. Virginia Baz Baroiu has a fantastic life story, which includes two periods of refuge, one in childhood, and we discover in her paintings this search for a space, a community, the creation of a suspended island, a place that the artist identifies with that home. That home that was on the run, in Chernivtsi, in refuges, in Slatina, in Bucharest in the 1950s, where she graduated from the Art Institute with important teachers trained in Paris. That home begins with her arrival in Timisoara in 1958, where she recognizes something of the architecture and customs of the Bukovina community that she left behind, but which she never truly left. A series of themes that come and return and become meta-themes of the artist's creation: the prevalence of cityscapes she visited or lived in, on the banks of the Bega river in the 50s. But she is also an artist who runs away and withdraws, she closes herself in the studio where she creates those islands in watercolors. She crosses different political periods. She has works with orientalist accents and incorporates all the styles she encountered - modernism expressed in cubist forms, socialist realism imposed as a doctrine in that period," curator of the exhibition "Sky, Earth and the Word", Andreea Foanene Petcu, museographer of the MNArT and cultural theorist, told AGERPRES.
The works are presented under 11 thematic titles, including "People and Shores" (comprising studies, portraits and landscapes at the beginning of the journey), "Necessary Imprints" (cityscapes, re-created worlds, the painter as a witness of her time), "The Artist's Studio" (the room where dreams begin), "Worlds with their own gravity" (painting as a saving island), "At the gates of the dream" (painting as a sign of connection and memory), "Time between heaven and earth", "Wanderers, Martyrs, Refugees, Travelers" (on the untrodden paths of the spaces between worlds), "Heaven and Earth will pass" (between the ephemeral and the eternal).
The works that depict faces go from the innocence of the child to the collective terrors that resemble Dante's inferno, with disfigurements and horror, as the artist must have seen on the faces of the people she knew during the war and the refuge period.
"In late childhood and pre-adolescence she had two refuges. Her father worked as a medic at the front. Her family traveled with the front. Virginia was 8 or 10 when she went to her first refuge. It's a recurring theme in her life. This accumulation of characters is the form of a long string of personal experiences that make me think of the fears painted by Corneliu Baba. They refer to crazy people, who travel almost without fear, in search of a home they can't find. I am sure that these images worked a lot inside Virgina Baz Baroiu and, in a way, helped her to decide to become a painter," says Andreea Foanene.
The whole exile brought the artist very close to the Divinity, she painted churches, portraits of saints that express a very intense religious experience, the grace of inspiration that she applies and to which she always returns, both through pictorial experiments and through painting as poetry and prayer.
Virginia Baz Baroiu's paintings thus become an epistle for future generations and nourishment for loved ones.
At 93, the artist is still full of life and ready for a new exhibition.
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