Alexandra
Nechita - "My Journey" Kenworth
W. Moffett, Ph.D
Former Curator, 20th Century Art, Boston Museum of Fine Art
Former Director , Fort Lauderdale Museum
Learning
to see
Tony
Clark, Director Emeritus, The Severin Wunderman Museum
Fixing
Dreams
William
A. Emboden, Ph. D
Professor Emeritus, California State University
Alexandra
Nechita "My Journey"
Kenworth
W. Moffett, Ph.D
Former Curator, 20th Century Art, Boston Museum of Fine Art
Former Director , Fort Lauderdale Museum
Alexandra Nechita is certainly
an exceptional talent; a pure prodigy in a field of endeavor,
which has produced few prodigies.
Full size painting on canvas
is a demanding idiom, usually mastered only after years of trial
and error, of feeling one's way into a rich and complex medium.
By the age of ten, Alexandra
was already producing strikingly accomplished canvases, which
could easily be mistaken for the work of a talented and fully
mature artist.
Picasso was a child prodigy.
However, Picasso displayed his precocity as a realist. His actual
childhood works lacked childishness and naivete. He later said
that it has taken him a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.
Alexandra began where Picasso
ended up. From the first she has worked in a free, modern abstract
style. Indeed, she has consciously rejected realist and academic
techniques, demanding from the first to be completely herself.
Her confidence, her clarity of will and vision are perhaps what
is most impressive about Alexandra Nechita.
In this sense, her earliest
accomplishments are more remarkable than Picasso's. Moreover,
she has assimilated other modernists too, like Chagall and Miro.
The result might be called her own version of European CoBra painting.
But Alexandra's work goes
beyond sources and similarities with the work of previous artists.
In the end, it is the energy and life, the exuberant vitality
of her works, which makes them stand out anywhere as fully realized
works of art, as works of an artist of intelligence, finesse,
humor, sensitivity and strength.
Dr
Maria Lluisa Borras
Executive Committee, Miro Foundation
Barcelona, Spain
I have read wonderful critiques
about Nechita, the prodigy child of painting, written by well-know
scholars, museum directors and university teachers. All of them
come up with similar questions. How is it possible to be born
with such a gift? Where does her intuitive knowing of Modern art
come from? They frequently relate the art of Nechita to that of
Picasso. I don't think that it's necessary that we look for a
relation between the art of this prodigious Romanian painter and
the historic vanguards or with the art of the 20th century. I
don't know who oriented Nechita in her early days, or if there
was someone whom she learned from, but it appears to me that from
her beginnings she came to her departure point through a logical
and intuitive progression as do those who come "not knowing".
Such are the Primitives who are the artists who don't know the
"historical wise art". A Primitive artist is any self-taught
artist of anytime. The term Primitive is also applied to the art
of black Africa or to the art of Australia and America pre-Columbian
natives. From this understanding comes the "coincidence"
of seeing similarities between Nechita and Picasso, because Picasso
drank the waters of Primitive art in the Musee de'l Homme in Paris.
The paintings of Nechita,
especially in the beginning, are Primitive and her art melts this
synthesis as in the Benin Masks. All you have to do is to look
at paintings such as Spiritual Poverty, Colors of Your Soul, Bounded
Spirit, A Step Back, By My Window, and Glowing Peace to see it.
As with every great artist, Nechita did not stop there. This fantastic
intuition was not enough; she evolved and created a language impregnated
with the world that she observed. Like in Yellow Submarine, assimilating
the peculiar taste from the Beatles film or Irreplaceable where
it is symbolism that takes priority. The really extraordinary
thing about Nechita is her complexity and the technical virtuosity
that she is capable of reaching coming from Primitivism. That's
what I feel looking at such compositions as Harp Sounds or Rain
Drops, without doubt the most picturesque of the exhibition, with
that intention to separate form and colour into bands.
Looking at this point in
Nechita's history I think it is necessary to forget that she was
once a prodigy child and surrender to the fact that she is today
an artist with an incredible imagination and excellent technical
skills. This puts her by her own right as one of the prominent
universal artists of today.
Nechita:
Portrait of the Neo-Modernist as a very young women
Peter Frank
Editor, Art Critic, Author and Curator
Member: College Art Association of America
International Association of Art Critics (AICA)
Alexandra
Nechita is coming of age in a post-modern universe. As she passes
into her teen years, and her precocity becomes less and less a provocative
issue, we can - we must - see her more and more for her accomplishments
as an artist per se. But in this day and age, those accomplishments
themselves can provoke unusual discussion, on several levels. Alexandra
Nechita and her art remain, literally as well as figuratively, remarkable.
No longer should, or can, we regard Nechita's artwork - painting,
drawing, prints, and more recently, sculpture - as a phenomenon
apart from historical or contemporary artistic discourse. Like the
performances of young concert soloists or pre-teen actors, Nechita's
work, beyond its youthful source, demands to be considered in light
of its time, place, and precursors. As such, we can see that Nechita
works in a distinctly modernist mode, conflating aspects of cubism,
expressionism, and (to a lesser extent) surrealism. She has thereby
determined for herself a style not dissimilar to that of the postwar
northern-European movement COBRA, in which the playfulness, even
buoyancy, of quasi-natural (including humanoid) forms veils a darker,
almost existential spirit.
COBRA itself took its cues form the art of outsiders - untrained
artists, children, even the insane. Nechita's art has from the beginning
sought a more sophisticated voice than that (commencing her career
as a child, after all, she has had no need to emulate children's
art), and in the conscious, even willful formal articulation she
brings to her images Nechita does take a few steps away from the
raw, if complex, passions invested in their art by COBRA painters
such as Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, and Pierre Alechinsky. Reacting
against their academy training, they idealized the concept of pure
spontaneity. Having recognized herself as an artist while still
young enough to manifest such spontaneity without forethought, Nechita
has moved in the opposite direction, acquiring knowledge and technique
through observation and training - but not to the point where the
impulse of her vision has become indentured to current or recent
stylistic prescriptions.
In that, Nechita still follows
her own muse, even to the point of contradicting contemporary mainstream
practices. By recapitulating, fusing, and ultimately personalizing
practices that were mainstream a half-century to a century earlier,
Nechita declares herself modernist to the core, and seems to resist
post-modern artistic doctrine. Or does she? At its most expansive,
post-modernism has promulgated a non-progressive, a-telelogical
understanding of artistic practice (Western or otherwise). Art,
as John Perreault (among other post-modern commentators) has observed,
does not necessarily progress; it simply proceeds. By that dint,
artists are at liberty to re-explore modes and methods whose time
has supposedly passed - not just antique styles revived for modern
times, but modern and pre-modern styles supposedly consigned to
history, no matter how recently. In this interpretation of post-modernism
- which we see in the late buildings of Phillip Johnson, hear in
the jazz-licked music of William Bolcom and John Harbison, and witness
in the old- and modern-master-quoting canvases of George Deem, Richard
Pettibone, and Mike Bidlo - any and all aspects of art history are
up for grabs.
The difference is that, while dyed-in-the-wool post-modernists appropriate
their historical references as citations, excerpts or approximations
- that is, with conceptual quotation marks around them - Nechita
delves into now-historic styles for the sheer energy and pleasure
they afford practitioner and viewer alike. She is inspired by the
rough facets of Picasso's Cubism and the sprightly abstraction of
Kandinsky, by the passionate figuration of expressionist painters
such as Van Gogh and Rouault, by Dali's and Miro's impossible distortions
of the human form. Nechita is not a "modernist," she is
a Modernist. She believes in modernism for its own sake. That is,
she believes in modernist practice for its own sake (not least because
she discovered it in herself long before she saw the work of other
modernists); the ideology of modernism does not inspire her, at
least at present. (Indeed, as she grows in sophistication and addresses
herself more to artistic theory, she may have emendations of her
own to make to modernist ideology.) You can call Nechita a neo-modernist
of a sort, growing not out of modernist (and, for that matter post-modernist)
theory but towards it.
Nechita's allegiance to (neo-) modernist practice serves her well,
as it requires of her a facility with paint in place of a non- (even
anti-) modernist facility with rendering (or, for that matter, a
post-modernist facility with words and/or the camera). As supple
as is her line, as fluid as is her brush, as modulated as her palette
might be (even in paintings whose colors seem to have issued right
from the tube), Nechita does not display the ability, much less
the desire, to paint or draw a picture that mirrors reality. She
may in fact command such ability innately, but she does not need,
or want, to. (When sent to a traditional art academy she lasted
all of three weeks.)
What Nechita commands instead is a far more idiosyncratic grasp
of what to modern (and neo-modern) eyes constitutes pictorial cohesion,
and commands as well the optical and manual ability to realize this
cohesion.
All of her work goes into the production of something more than
an image: what is produced is an image issuing from both the mind
of the artist and a physical encounter with the media employed,
whether those media are as rigid as lithography, as obdurate as
steel, or as responsive - yet tricky, even treacherous - as oil
on canvas. Like any true modernist, Nechita paints (or draws, sculpts,
or prints) her world for our delectation; she does not mirror ours
back at us. And like any good modernist, Nechita paints her world
with her evident skills modified to the task, so that her world,
no matter how peculiar or daunting it may seem, asks us in.
In this respect, Nechita is anything but a modernist ideologue.
While the strategies of modernism include challenging its viewers
and shocking otherwise complacent society, Nechita maintains a basically
benign relationship with her audience. Significantly, she is not
eager to please; her bumptious, often riotously distorted imagery
makes its way into pictorial (and, more recently, sculptural) form
without heed as to whom it may puzzle, put off, or even offend.
Like any good modernist, she gives concrete form to subjective impulse,
giving credence only to what she sees and feels within. But at the
same time Nechita is readily forthcoming with explanation of her
intentions, methods, and aspirations. In her many encounters with
the public she patiently recapitulates her stories and her aims,
and does so while maintaining an almost preternatural poise and
articulateness - which qualities themselves distance her from the
common construct of the artist (modernist and even post-modernist)
as a diffident, almost mute (or, conversely, incoherently garrulous)
Bohemian. And she is as unaffected in her narrative now as she was
when she first came to public attention six or so years ago.
Nechita's art has been compared here to that of the artists in the
COBRA group. More upbeat and even more eclectic than the work produced
around 1950 (and to varying degress since) by the surrealism- and
expressionism-influenced "angry young men" of COpenhagen,
BRussels, and Amsterdam, Nechita's art prompts even closer stylistic,
and spiritual, comparison with two other notable artists of the
20th century - one predating COBRA, one following it, obliquely
but knowingly.
Jean Cocteau was one of the great polymaths of the modernist era,
working in nearly every discipline, by himself or in collaboration
with others, from literature to music to dance. The art form that
seems to spring the most freely from Cocteau's mind and hand, thus
lying closest to Cocteau's soul, however, is pictorial: conjuring
figures and other images out of so many darting and meandering lines,
the apparitions Cocteau painted, sculpted, and above all drew have
a genial spontaneity to them, an unfettered immediacy that transcends,
even as it enlivens, the narratives, or even the illustrative tasks,
they bear. In this, and in their pan-modernist stylization (which
takes in symbolism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, and surrealism),
Cocteau's visual artwork prefigures Nechita's.
So does that of a less likely predecessor, the "angry young
man" of New York's mean streets: Jean Michel Basquiat. A gifted
near-autodidact like Nechita, Basquiat's line-driven neo-expressionist
imagery did not emerge from an unsophisticated world, or even art-world,
view. But he did allow himself an approach that was almost diaristic,
and certainly stream-of-consciousness and quasi-surrealist in its
emulation of "automatic writing". From Basquiat's hands
images and words flowed with equal abandon - and, as it happened,
with equal formal rigor - onto canvas and paper. Nechita's imagery
may (at least at this point) be less urbane, elaborate, and foreboding
than Basquiat's, but it maintains the same volubility and what you
might call stylized impulse. That is, in both Basquiat's case and
Nechita's the urge to give form to a thought or a feeling takes
shape in a manner deliberately, if effortlessly, consistent with
the artist's style. You can tell a Basquiat from a mile away; by
such a yardstick, Nechita's can be told from, oh, about a thousand
feet. This year.
In one aspect, however, Nechita is very, very different than Cocteau
or Basquiat. She is not a writer. Cocteau, best known for his writing,
infused even the simplest of his drawings with a literary aura,
not to mention a telling melancholy; and it is not hard to tell
in the decorous trails his pen or pencil left on paper that his
is the contemplative line of the storyteller, as well as the elegant
line of the calligrapher. The calligraphic gesture also informs
Basquiat's work, and the written word recurs insistently therein,
to the point where his works on paper, and even paintings, can start
to seem like notebook or diary entries. Nechita may exercise a sure
and lively line, but it is the line of a picturemaker, not that
of a writer. She may have a calligrapher's touch, and she certainly
loves line for its own sake, not just as an armature for color and
composition; but Nechita's images are not notations, they are apparitions.
Nechita has been consistent
in her style from the outset of her career. Like all artists, she
experiments; like all good artists, she takes her experiments seriously;
like all serious artists, she carefully considers the outcome of
each experiment and evaluates it in terms of its applicability to
her vision. Even more than her style, Nechita's vision has remained
consistent from the beginning. Ironically, however, it could ultimately
be her vision rather than her style that mutates the most dramatically
- or seems to.
Nechita's outlook is a humanist one. It is one that, typical to
modernism, conflates the personal and the universal, valorizing
the individual point of view but sharing it with the world. She
has a sense of mission, but her sense of the world is hopeful. Her
vision follows suit, tempering a risible - you might say, in the
best sense of the word, grotesque - regard for the figure with wit,
affection and verve. As she evolves Nechita is unlikely to lose
her humanist bent; and her sense of mission and of hope, clearly
not fragile, is not going to be easily compromised. How she manifests
these basic sentiments, however - how she continues to measure humanity
against her aspirations for it, and how she regards the fate of
this peculiar planet - will evolve in response to exterior as well
as interior events. In otherwords, clouds can come between Nechita
and her sun - that is, between her sunny nature and her comprehension
of life and art. She may have reason at some point in her career
to modify her vision, so that the grotesque may overtake the affection
(although the wit and verve are unlikely to diminish).
But any artistic temperament reserves for itself such changes in
weather, or (less likely, but not impossible), a change in climate.
And the temperament of a child, and especially that of an adolescent,
hangs likewise in the balance. But, then, the astounding maturity
Nechita displays, in the execution of both her art and her public
role as artist - a maturity that should be the envy of artists (and
many others) twice, three times her age - gives reassuring indication
that her interior artistic climate is stable and durable.
Does this mean that Nechita, in her contentment, will simply be
churning out "Nechitas" for the rest of her life? Not
likely. As an important part of her evident maturity, Nechita evinces
a groundedness, a lack of defensiveness, and a quick and hungry
intellect, all necessary ingredients for meaningful artistic growth.
As part of her love for the world, she remains open to its multifarious
influence - and remains similarly open to the many models afforded
by art. Nechita's style, and the vision that drives it, will perforce
evolve. And equally, it will always be her style. It will always
show traces of her current manner, the totemic, figure-centered
cubo-expressionism that has seemed to come so effortlessly from
her mind and hand but which she has actually worked hard to perfect.
(She is famous for spending long hours in her studio.
She may love every minute spent there, but what she loves about
her studio time is the ongoing struggle she must engage in to match
vision to material, to master her media while riding her vision.)
If Nechita's style can be described as "totemic" and "figure-centered",
note should be made of its compositional complexity, a complexity
that has increased in recent works (notably the lithographic series).
This complexity, evolving naturally out of Nechita's ongoing reconsideration
of cubism, brings about a fusion, or at least elision, of the figure
with (or into) its surroundings. One of the revolutionary achievements
of cubism in pictorial terms was the dissolution it effected of
boundaries between figure and ground; as object (figure or still
life) and space (landscape) were now all rendered with the same
interplay of facets, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish
one play of facets from another. The resulting visual and subjective
ambiguity has been one of the most challenging aspects of cubism
from its inception. The vivacity of Nechita's images can divert
us from this aspect of her work, but sooner or later we note, with
some unease and with deepening engagement, her conflation of figure
and ground.
This aspect of Picasso's cubism seems to be one of the few Nechita
is carrying over into her newest work. Instead, the playful anxiousness
of Miro's abstract surrealism and the anxious playfulness of COBRA
are coming more and more to undergird Nechita's vision. She is marrying
cubist formal ambiguity to the others' ambiguity of spirit. The
ambiguous nature of her pictures thus redoubles - but does not overwhelm
the insouciance that is still at the core of her vision. Even in
its burgeoning ambiguity, the increasingly worldly uncertainty that
betrays Nechita's entrance into adolescence, the work remains exuberant.
It is actually getting funnier; a mark of her maturity is the increasing
command Nechita is taking of her own wit. The figural distortions
seem more and more pointed, their facial grotesqueries more masklike
and comical, their bodily attenuations less childlike and more slapstick.
Gradually purging her work of childhood's crude stylizations, Nechita
would seem to be turning instead to the more various, and certainly
more controlled, visual universe of the comic strip and cartoon.
It is not hard to imagine Nechita's people - or, if you would, peoploids
- dancing onscreen, in movie theaters, on television sets, or even
on computer monitors. Their strong but not overemphasized linear
armatures and their equally powerful intimations of motion set them
up for kinetic reinterpretation. But they would be awfully unorthodox
cartoon characters, as they seem to spend a lot more time changing
appearances and identities than in doing anything - anything, that
is, on which animated film could impose its inevitable demand for
a story. Maybe it will be enough that Nechita's spry, jocular quasi-humans
simply dance before our eyes much as they seem to now; maybe animated
film will broaden and mature in its possibilities so that popular
animation will no longer have to have a story line - or, for that
matter, a beginning, a middle, or an end. In that way, animation
will return to its roots, will accept and incorporate digital descendants
such as screen savers, and, finally, embrace visual art as a sister
discipline and a dynamic presence of equal force and allure. Certainly,
Alexandra Nechita's visual art commands such force, and exercises
such allure over an audience that overlaps, or should. You might
call Nechita's work the thinking girl's Fantasia. It is definitely
the thinking girl's neo-modernism.
Bruce
Helander
Former Provost, Rhode Island School of Design
The amazing journey of Alexandra
Nechita has all the storybook components of a bona -fide fairy
tale. Alexandra exhibited early clues to a creative future. At
the age of two, coloring books became her violin strings, and
visual music began to emerge in her work--four years before she
discovered the paintings of Picasso.
Alexandra's exhibition at
the Coral Springs Museum of Art is a cause for celebration. This
is not just because it is a very rare occasion that most artists
wait a lifetime for, but because the individual works on display
have been selected for their museum qualities and visitors will
discover the remarkable secrets of this young artist's success.
For it is at this show that a certain appreciation for abstraction
will become apparent. It is possible to teach the basics of landscape
painting or still life to almost anyone; and, with enough practice,
most viewers can recognize the narrative aspects of the finished
work regardless of quality.
Abstraction on the other
hand is basically an intuitive gift that can only come from the
heart and soul of the artist. It cannot be taught. It is generally
accepted that abstract expressionism is fundamentally the most
important artistic contribution that America has given to the
world. Pioneers like de Kooning, Franz Kline and Motherwell began
their careers with traditional studio imagery: figures, objects
and backgrounds. As they became more confident, their work became
more abstract and finally the narrative courageously disappeared.
Herein lies the long-term
excitement for an artist of fourteen years who has commanded the
attention of the international community. It is surely possible
for an artist, who demonstrated unique creativity in her second
year of life (and who has worked almost every day since), to evolve
into another undiscovered level of expression on canvas. No artist
is satisfied with the same creative formulas forever, no matter
how successful and secure. It is an opportunity for the world
around Nechita to stop and wonder after viewing this amazing display
of polished talent. Exactly where this artist will go over the
next twenty years is a topic of speculation and excitement.
America is holding its breath.
We know a major discovery will eventually unfold. The perpetual
motion of Alexandra Nechita's motivation, talent and success will
surely land into uncharted territory to the benefit of us all.
Her evolution into a mature artist of continued world renown will
no doubt be a permanent benchmark into the history of art.
Tony Clark, Director Emeritus, The Severin Wunderman Museum
The art of Alexandra Nechita
is unique in several ways. I have had the great pleasure of watching
the prodigious works of a child mature into the masterful compositions
of a young woman. I have watched as she has given precise definition
to her spiritual language of art. Apart from the harmony and rhythms
set up by her exquisite color sense, the strength of her forms
and the security of her line, I have found that she extracts beauty
from the world. In addition, she creates beauty from a world belonging
only to her. In her painterly rhythms and sonorities, she exudes
a certain magic that defies any definition.
I do not mean to suggest
that Alexandra is in any way inarticulate; to the contrary, she
is absolutely clear about the content of her works and is capable
of expressing her ideas on and with clarity and candor. What is
it like to enter into Alexandra's studio? She states: "My
studio is my palace. Each unpainted canvas is a gate that I open
to enter into my own universe and to allow my imagination to breathe."
These are hardly the words of a child, and they are as inspired
as the paintings that she creates. "Painting is not work;
it is both my joy and my passion," states Alexandra. Critics
have compared her to the great artists of the 20th Century, Klee,
Kandinsky, Dali and, above all, Picasso. "I don't want to
wear the shoes of any other artist...I just want to be known as
Nechita."
Alexandra makes painterly
use of all her daily experience and thought. Painting is her other
language (although she is fluent in English and Romanian). It
is the language of her soul and the poetry of her inner life.
Her colors, lines and forms awaken in us psychic and spiritual
forces with which we can identify in a way not easily expressed.
It is as though she has presided over our dreams and given them
a life of their own on her canvases...
Nechita has said to her
viewers upon questioning: "I want you to look into my paintings
and not just look at them." "I don't want to merely
show a desk, or a table as a table: I want you to know how I feel
about these things." This is Alexandra's deeply felt desire
to communicate that special way of seeing and feeling that is
within her and which manifests itself on her canvases. What she
is telling us is that there are many ways of seeing and that these
do not have to remain hidden. She takes it upon herself to transform
the ordinary into the extraordinary; again, taking the banal and
elevating it to the level of poetry. It was Jean Cocteau who first
stated, "All art is plastic poetry."
William
A. Emboden, Ph. D
Professor Emeritus, California State University
"Out of the course of nature: marvelous" is the definition
given in Webster's Dictionary for the word "prodigy."
It is an epithet too loosely used today and applied to athletes
and musicians who have often honed skills taught from childhood.
By contrast, Alexandra Nechita
is one of those marvelous creatures who is, assuredly, "out
of the course of nature." Her skills were thrust upon her by
God when she was but a few years old. She has subsequently perfected
her art and expanded it, but not through the normal course of learning.
Being attuned to everything around her, Alexandra devours all and
regurgitates it in myriad forms and colors that challenge nature.
The often-heroic paintings
dwarfed her when she was seven years of age and giving life to canvas.
By her twelfth year, she was statuesque, slim and as well spoken
as any adult. Her brush had not left her hand at any time. The world
became reinterpreted in ever more sophisticated ways. The fabric
of her painted dreams was always the idea vs. the object. Copying
nature never presented a challenge; hers is the art of transformation...
All of us are familiar with
the fables of Aesop, but it was Montaigne who instructed us in their
several meanings and interpretations. It was he who told us that
we make our own myths that accord well with the fable. He also informs
us that these simple tales have other more vital, essential and
innate aspects, which we rarely are able to penetrate. Such is the
art of Nechita, so very simple and yet so filled with terrible mysteries,
poetry, love, grace and personal myth…
Nechita's paintings are of
the nature of dreams, in that they inform us of their organic and
ever-changing nature. We are aware of the expanse of the journey
and then the awakening. But unlike dreams, we carry them with us
in a form that transcends memory. They become us. They are a part
of us, and we are not certain that we have truly awakened. Her dreams
project themselves into our world and we are thus transfigured.
The extravagance of the experience disturbs us and we may endeavor
to forget the experience, but it has become us. Our chemistry is
forever altered, and we are as terrified as we are amused. It is
a thing that we are unable to recount to others with any degree
of satisfaction. We know the content of the dream down to the finest
details. We look again and then again. We are astonished by what
we see and what we have become…
There are times when it would
appear that the powers that drive an artist to work are independent
of their rational thought. Not that painting is irrational, rather
it has a reason of its own and that often informs us in ways that
astonish. It is another self that stands apart and with its own
perspective interprets from a point that is at odds from where we
believe ourselves to be. The artist must rely on a memory that interprets
in its own fashions and with its own distortions. We are seduced
by the legends of our memories and are loyal to them even when we
have a consciousness that perspective has been inverted and that
a spell has been cast upon us. This is the artist's necessary stance.
Alexandra is very attuned to
the events of her time, and these are commingled with personal experiences,
friendships, pain and every other sentiment that works upon her
mind. It is her wondrous transformation of events, people and objects
that gives a unique luster to her painting. Her distortions become
her grammar and syntax of painting. There is no comparative in her
painterly vocabulary for her brush expresses convictions in an absolute
sense. When she draws, each work is self-contained and is not merely
a preliminary treatment for another mode of expression. Each of
her works becomes a powerful and independent medium. In each, she
expresses sensitivity to both her subject and her materials by way
of conviction and vision. Power, truth and magic reside in Nechita's
paintings and drawings. They enlighten us both about the human condition
and us; they are often farcical in elegant ways and explore areas
that are sensitive or even embarrassing.
Beauty may be found in the
quality of her line, the richness of her tonality, the nuances of
her colors in their many modulations and the sense of joy imparted
by the whole. The real content of her works is evoked by the manner
in which the subject has been handled. Her sensitivity, again, distinguishes
her.
We must always ask of a painting
whether there is any real quality in the piece. This means that
we must explore ideas and how they have been expressed. In so doing,
we are looking inside the artist. Figuration and abstraction are
not opposing forces in Nechita's works, for she is not exclusive
in her approaches. Her intent seems to be to give a painting life,
to make it worthy of her intent and our contemplation. She has no
classical division of space, no golden mean. Her paintings are governed
by a lyrical exploration of space and its relationship to color.
This is the poetry for her canvases and its music as well…