Art in Conversation with Ana Maria Panaitescu
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ana Maria Panaitescu (b. 1968) member of the Romanian Artists' Union is a contemporary visual artist, author of Manual of Visual Arts education for ninth grade. (Romania)
Ana Maria Panaitescu graduated Art University in Bucharest in 1997 (BA) and 1999 (MA) She had numerous exhibitions, both individual and group shows in galleries throughout Romania and other European countries and she has paintings, collages and photography in private collections in Europe and United States.
ANA MARIA PANAITESCU
Visual Artist | Romania
Artist Statement
My intention is to use just a few elements and see how much I can transmit to people who are watching, in assamblage, painting and digital photo collage. A kind of “less is more.” Most of my work is about using traditional materials (like wood, canvas, paper, cardboard, metal, oil colors) and finding a way to combine it with new stuff, like silicon, acrylics, polystyrene, different types of strong glue, etc. It is my way of being traditional and living in our days at the same time, a way of respect for our ancestors and going forward, adding a contemporary sign. In assemblages, I use different objects; one example is my collection of earth collected from different places around the world, which people brought me from their travels. This represents the travels that I only got to make in my imagination. I found a poem by e.e. cummings, titled “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond,” and I liked it a lot; I used this name for some of my artwork. Much of my work has this theme, of travels never made.
All of my recent works are a geometrical and serialist research, it is about the complex variation of horizontal and vertical lines composition.These days, the ideas of "contactless" and "isolation" has become powerful for all of us. In trying to represent this, I found that the serialism is helping me a lot. Finding some elements that I repeat, is very interesting to me. For a long time now, I have admired Andy Warhol's work, in the same measure that I value and draw upon my native Byzantine roots.
Usually my works are stages of a theme that I study for many years. And I don’t like the “story” when it is about visual arts. The stories are wonderful, but I don’t like to find a story in an image. I like to keep the things only about composition, color, line, dot, light, shadow, etc. and to offer emotions in this register, using these elements. Is not easy, because it is another “language”. So, the cleanest way to give names to my works is to admit that I have these stages of a theme. This is why numbers came often after the name, like My Earth Collection 1, 2, 3, or even Serialism 1, 2, 3, etc.