Doina Botez. Il corpo dell'immagine. Opere 1989-2013

In 1989 - the fateful year in the history of her Bucharest and all of Europe - Doina Botez settled permanently in Rome. She was of course aware of the international situation, but the disruption in her life forced her to clearly outline her identity and calling as an artist.
She had just completed an intense period of graphic art, illustration and scenography. Her relationship with figuration is essential. It implies designing a visual theatre out of tangible experience, it implies so expanding the feeling of existence that, as Socrates recommended, the "motions of the soul" come to the fore. It means sifting and updating the long tradition of the image with a symbolic and allusive value, emphasising its referential surface aspects, coagulating a highly poetic, rather than prosaic, condensation.
Botez's situation differs vastly from the artists of her generation. Art reduced to talk about art, the intellectualistic game whereby contemporary art, infantilised by self-contemplation, has come to conceive itself as a mere self-referential and voided phantasm, a spectacle of images born of a blind narcissistic spell, are genetically alien to her. She cares nothing for the novelty of the means, cultural jokes, fashionable affectation. Painting is painting, unconditionally. What matters is what you do with it, and especially why: Francesco Arcangeli wrote that "art, the work, this piece of canvas or panel, this flat and conventionally rectangular surface is a medium to which everything can still be entrusted: everything you are, you think, you long for". The picture, for her, is a necessary image, a soul-fact to be realised in painting and offered to the beholder's mental and emotional experience with the utmost intensity and directness.