Ruxandra Papa

Member - Romanian Artists Association

Education
1981-1985 :: completed university studies at the "Nicolae Grigorescu" Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, as Master of Fine Arts, with three majors in Painting (Monumental Art), Conservation-Restoration and Art Teaching.
1985-1986 :: Restoration course - canvas painting - Culture Ministry
1985-1986 :: Restoration course - canvas painting - National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania
1995 :: Restoration and preservation course - painting on wood - J. Paul Getty Museum Malibu, California

Distinctions and Prizes
1988 :: Honorable Prize - Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Canada
1989 :: First Prize - International Art Exhibition of Miniature, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Canada
1990 :: Prize - International Exhibition Maison Laffite, France
1995 :: Honorable Prize, "Del Bello" Gallery, Canada

Group Exhibitions
1983,1985,1986 :: Exhibition, National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania
1986,1988 :: Biennial of painting and sculpture, Dalles Hall, Bucharest, Romania
1987 :: Exhibition "ThePortrait", "Caminul Artei" Gallery, Bucharest
1988 :: Exhibition "The Landscape", "Caminul Artei" Gallery, Bucharest
1988,1989 :: International Art Exhibition of Miniature, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Canada
1990 :: International painting exhibition, Maison Laffite, France
1992 :: Exhibition, National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania
1992 :: International Art Exhibition of Miniature, "Del Bello" Gallery, Toronto, Canada
1994 :: Memory Exhibition "Nichita Stanescu", Ploiesti, Romania
1994,1995 :: Exhibition, National Theatre Bucharest, Romania
1995 :: Spring exhibition, Central Army House, Bucharest, Romania
1995 :: International Art Exhibition of Miniature, "Del Bello" Gallery, Toronto, Canada
1995 :: Exhibition "Brabantse Dag", Heeze, Holland
1995 :: Painting Exhibition, World Trade Center, Bucharest, Romania
1996 :: Painting Exhibition, Exhibition Hall, Internal Ministry
1998 :: Exhibition, National Theatre, Bucharest, Romania

Solo Exhibitions
1988 :: "G.A.M.B.", Bucharest, Romania
1994 :: "G.A.M.B.", Bucharest, Romania
1996 :: "Deutsches Museum" Munchen, Germany
1996 :: "Gijzenroi" Gallery, Geldrop, Holland
1997 :: "Danish Power Consult" Art Club, Copenhaga, Denmark
2000 :: "CCA" Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2006 :: "Caminul Artei Gallery" Bucharest
2006 :: "Galateca Gallery" Bucharest, Romania
2009 :: "Royal Gallery" Ferdinand hall Sinaia, Romania

Works in private collections: Romania, Germany, U.S.A., Denmark, Japan, Canada, Italy, Ecuador, France, United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Holland.

I never liked being asked what I wanted to say with a certain painting.
A painting is a multitude of feelings, contradictions, questions.
It can be piece of one's soul at a certain moment.
It can be an instant experience or an eternal one.
It can be the "before" or "after" reflection.
It is something magic…
A painting can not be reduced to just some words.
A painting asks questions, does not answer them.
A painting revealing everything at a first glance is poor.
It has to fascinate you and touch you each time you look at it, for a lifetime.
It is not meant to only bring joy to the eye, but most of all to the soul.
Just as Umberto Eco wrote his books with certain, different levels of reading in mind, my paintings are meant for different levels of perception and understanding... from philosophy to the simple joy of looking.
Sometimes, a question can be richer and more interesting than the answer itself.
My paintings do not rely on typical symbols, even if they reveal the fundamental unity of many areas of reality.
The light as a primordial element allows the flow from one level to another, integrating meanings and shapes without particularizing them.
In this context, light will define life, which tends to bring back balance and unity, in an attempt to imitate the spirit in its quest for stability.
The philosophical symbols with a defining appearance identify, assimilate and unify heterogeneous levels and realities, irreducible in appearance.
The human being itself is a symbol, thus its existence is enriched and amplified.
It will not be removed or estranged from itself, on the contrary, its own existence and destiny will be unveiled.
Let us try not to damage the genuine existence and the clear-sightedness of the feelings with a fragmentary understanding or explanation which will only bring us to a shallow revelation of experiences that all of us have inside.
Ruxandra Papa

Distinctions and Prizes
1988 :: Honorable Prize - Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Canada
1989 :: First Prize - International Art Exhibition of Miniature, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Canada
1990 :: Prize - International Exhibition Maison Laffite, France
1995 :: Honorable Prize, "Del Bello" Gallery, Canada

Ruxandra Papa paints "mystery in daylight" as Virgil Mocanu very well notices in a preface of the catalogue.
Detached from the natural environment and depicted in part as characters in spaces with openings towards infinite the items of our daily life have grandeur and mystery. It is not Surrealism, as some people might think when in a hurry they try to find in a debut the influence of an artistic moment, but portrait painting, under a paradigm sign.
The eyes of an artist know to impose a motif, may this be as common as possible, so that a normal table covered with a cloth may impress us and make us think of philosophical issues.
Analyzing in detail the images created by Ruxandra Papa we could notice that the painter is not interested in objects, but in geometry that the objects have only the role of translating into the known and tangible background a tidy unknown dimension humanized through geometry.
Painters in all times were tempted to architecture wide spaces, touched by melancholy and solitude.
Ruxandra Papa as a person who restored and studied old paintings and artistic techniques, confesses in her painting attractions which honour her.
TUDOR OCTAVIAN

Ruxandra Papa's painting, apparently of a museum type, if we may say so, which brings us to an european tradition, hides the liberty of imagination, the liberty of conceiving in the landscape various implications. Architectures will never want to gain a great density; they are symbols, as if they were spectral appearances, tabernacle like which can hardly be related to nay kind of tradition ...
De Chirico is a compulsory reference, when we talk about an art which has the boldness of the fantastic, that is sometimes in full light. I would remark first of all, with Ruxandra Papa's painting, a coincidence with De Chirico's programmatic will, between 1925-1930, the will of imposing a material-handicraft side of performing It is this will of handicraft, in a sense which may place us within the circuit of a well that connects Ruxandra Papa to the master of fantastic, as well as the allusions to an enigmatic area that unexpectedly associates the human profile within the landscape....
This serenity which 'conceals the feverishness is one of the ways whose amplitude was depicted by Surrealism.
DAN HAULICA

Not belonging to a certain stylistic, in the way of idealizing a model or a prototype, but rather to a family of spirits, through affinities and emotional propensities, the painting, which Ruxandra Papa exhibits minutely and passionately within a continuous ideal dimension which became a programme, belongs to the Surrealistic tension, in some way to the pattern trend, the one illustrated by Magritte of Dali, by Leonor Fini of Pierre Roy.
The fascination of the symbolic object, withdrawn from assets with strong inheritance in time, similar to the cult for a metaphysical scenography of veiling, which separates a possible real. space form an oniric shelter, all of them result from the thought of the permanent human spirit adventure, with accents of "ingegno" and "meraviglia" of a metaphysical style.
Pictorially, each image remains beyond the charade of the mystery within the intellectual approach, a display of graphic virtuosity and chromatic dialogue.
VIRGIL MOCANU

Ruxandra Papa paints pale surreal visions that seem to emerge from a profound, mysterious, enigmatic and fascinating unconscious.
ENZO DI MARTINO (Il Gazzettino 1997) Venice

Ruxandra Papa presents recent paintings with clear Dali-esque roots, in which she emphasizes a perfect command of the painting technique, with a near perfect use of the graphical sign, together with a chromatic control which enables her to best express her imaginary cues.
In her surreal paintings ideas are diluted into hermetical images, which have the fascination of mystery. Her landscapes are surprising, with strange ruins or walls with no beginning and no detectable ending, or even more mysterious arcade doors.
Everything is immersed into an enchanting and metaphysical light, as if the dream world of the artist would seek to freeze some of her life moments. Archways full of symbols strike the viewer, pointing towards an invisible horizon, suggesting the search of a seemingly forever lost self. The more starved, desired and willing to be defined, the more evanescent it is.
GIORGIO PILLA (Gente Veneta 1997) Venice

Ruxandra Papa's paintings reveal the artist's inner world inviting the visitor to meditation, penetration into an apparently enigmatic atmosphere. Within the archways of the buildings within the wide spaces of nature, in the sunlight, the artist seeks the proofs for her own thoughts, trying to define instances of human being in the universe. The artist convinces us that the objects themselves have a "soul', an obvious life.
What impresses us is the spell of the colors their intensely elaborated harmony, the irreproachable work within the realism trend.
Ruxandra Papa's painting is the fruit of a tense logic, of compositional, coherent and constant science, where the essential issue is the relation between human being and objects, between human being and universe.
Ruxandra Papa's painting which is remarkably delicate combining elegance with seriousness of word, graphic expression with purity, refinement of work with deepness of thoughts offers us a promising perspective.
MIRCEA DEAC

Year by year, Ruxandra Papa has acquired and deepened the elements of her artistic craftsmanship, continuing to make herself known through the consistency and coherence of an artistic approach.
With this approach, the fantasy and inspiration from reality fruitfully joined together.
The artist combine with a remarkable interest not only the precious composition of the density of ideas, but of the portrait as well.
There are two main chains of Ruxandra Papa's composition, so far, in fact pretexts for a subtle chromatic orchestration, areas for harmony and colors capable of revealing the quality of a vigourous talent which adapts to its own sensibilities the stylistic modalities, without ostentation, but with personality. A way of expression which belongs in the first instance – those of compositions – to the vast territory of Surrealist painting.
And yet, Ruxandra Papa's surrealism is not "the son of fantasy and twilight", as Aragon defined it in 1924, on the contrary, it is the territory of a quiet reflection. An area environment, does not strictly mean the reality of an exotic vocabulary, but they try wide spaces, spectacular openings, towards the glamorous surface of the sea, white columns bent towards the blue fluid of the sky, the whole theme of these works shows a propensity towards a wide circuit of cultural and human values.
According to the laws of a representative, full of meanings fantasies, the artist's narrative reveals at the same time the care for completing each peace of art, towards a remarkable technical perfection of language.
MARINA PREUTU

For a rush expositor, the most at hand formula he is tempted to associate Ruxandra Papa's painting, is the Surrealism. And certainly, far from refusing the fertile contract with the most impressive achievements of modern art, the artist expressed an indisputable predilection for the respective trend.
However, what seems to me worthy of being remarked is that her painting is not reducible to the kinship with this trend. Applying the syntagma of the magic realism we might much more approach the essence of the painting we are referring to.
Belonging to that category of spirits who, in the words of Camil Petrescu , "contemplate ideas", the artist does not have on her painting cloth and place left to the diurnal concrete aspect, to the ambient.
It is true that, occasionally, in one painting or an other, some solitary personage beyond the limits of the time, in sumptuous raiment, contemplates, with his back to the looker, the infinite.
An art of ideas and intense feelings, a laborious art which means intellectual effort, Ruxandra Papa's painting also gathers precious technical virtues which reveal talent and craftsmanship.
And they reveal something else and that is a solid graphic knowledge, the artist maintaining a very close and long contact with the Renaissance painting, especially with the Flemish-Dutch one, which was thoroughly studied.
Anyway the virtuosity with which she recreates the light the understanding of the secrets linked with the control of colors which she knows how to temperate and exalt, the velvet like ambiance, similar to the "sfumatto Leonardo" like painted surfaces everything make us agree with Dan Haulica when he noticed – as he did six years ago – in Ruxandra Papa's works " a museum like painting" , and that means an art capable to aspiring to eternity conquering that essential dimension, which is time.
VASILE FLOREA

I do not label Ruxandra Papa as a surrealist despite the apparent features of her painting. In order to understand the meanings enacted by her clear cut construction art, with inconspicuous shapes, minutely and precisely welcomed in a space which is itself objectified by the intricate description, one must go beyond the stereotype linking this support of figurativeness and painting technique as it was expressed in the modern age by the surrealists. By the same token, we should recognize the indications of object reference as a symbolic whole, separating her from the cliches of representation in hyperrealism. This is why, as I was saying, these things point to a tradition preceding modernism, restoring to the present the functions of still life using the object as a support for meditation, as a departure point towards a reality which is manifest in the most simple things – a cup, a set of shapely pots, with evocatively archaic figures, with no other utility other than that of examination, a draped cloth, an element of architecture marking either the separation or the communication of two spaces. We may observe the joining technique which implies the sacred without resorting to the emblematic signs imposing it, the techniques which bestow so much charm upon the Flemish still lives of the 17 th century or so much metaphysical realism upon Spanish painting, such as in the case of Zurbarán. In the same context we may also refer to Caravaggio's famous "fruit basket". It is a direction in which the common object, the daily experience, invested with the intensity of immediacy, in a light which is at its turn invested with the meaning of indicating a different relationship, is used to trigger the viewer's attention and make him concentrate on this special presence. It is a direction linking every day life to the sacred and turning common actions into ritual.
This referential background is indicated in different manners in the works of Ruxandra Papa. Surrealism is only indicated as a reference through stylistic similarities, but it is separated by the semantic level enacted by the obviously different focuses on certain situations, by the decontextualization and recontextualization of these isolated realities. Flemish art is brought to mind by the direct quotation, as practiced by the surrealists as well, actually, of certain elements: the pattern of floors, the richness of the draping, the arches, the spatial vastness, that precise, almost conceptual transparency of Italian art, so very different from the fluidity of the infinite Northern spaces. A different level of functioning of the sign–objects in her painting is that of an ambiguous symbolism, a relaxation of the signifying chain, the actual chain of referential mediations between the sign-object, the sign-figure, the sign-space etc. and the meaning occulted by all of these indicated references. We can connect her painting which plays out so frankly the game between the formal obviousness and the mysterious significance to metaphysical painting, to fantastic realism, to the fantastic elements to be encountered in the art of De Chirico, singled out in Dan Haulica's 1986 text. Just like other gestures of postmodern art, Ruxandra Papa's attempt places artistic image in the larger series of cultural objects tending to condense the cultural meaning as much as possible, subscribing to a semantic core they bring out through the very act of protecting it by means of their playful juxtapositions, either manifest or formal, in the finite shape of an exhibition painting.
ALEXANDRA TITU

Group Exhibitions
1983,1985,1986 :: Exhibition, National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania
1986,1988 :: Biennial of painting and sculpture, Dalles Hall, Bucharest, Romania
1987 :: Exhibition "ThePortrait", "Caminul Artei" Gallery, Bucharest
1988 :: Exhibition "The Landscape", "Caminul Artei" Gallery, Bucharest
1988,1989 :: International Art Exhibition of Miniature, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Canada
1990 :: International painting exhibition, Maison Laffite, France
1992 :: Exhibition, National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania
1992 :: International Art Exhibition of Miniature, "Del Bello" Gallery, Toronto, Canada
1994 :: Memory Exhibition "Nichita Stanescu", Ploiesti, Romania
1994,1995 :: Exhibition, National Theatre Bucharest, Romania
1995 :: Spring exhibition, Central Army House, Bucharest, Romania
1995 :: International Art Exhibition of Miniature, "Del Bello" Gallery, Toronto, Canada
1995 :: Exhibition "Brabantse Dag", Heeze, Holland
1995 :: Painting Exhibition, World Trade Center, Bucharest, Romania
1996 :: Painting Exhibition, Exhibition Hall, Internal Ministry
1998 :: Exhibition, National Theatre, Bucharest, Romania

Solo Exhibitions
1988 :: "G.A.M.B.", Bucharest, Romania
1994 :: "G.A.M.B.", Bucharest, Romania
1996 :: "Deutsches Museum" Munchen, Germany
1996 :: "Gijzenroi" Gallery, Geldrop, Holland
1997 :: "Danish Power Consult" Art Club, Copenhaga, Denmark
2000 :: "CCA" Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2006 :: "Caminul Artei Gallery" Bucharest
2006 :: "Galateca Gallery" Bucharest, Romania
2009 :: "Royal Gallery" Ferdinand hall Sinaia, Romania

Works in private collections: Romania, Germany, U.S.A., Denmark, Japan, Canada, Italy, Ecuador, France, United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Holland.