„The actors of Carmen Olteanu’s painting are the dolls painted on canvas and the object dolls, in which we discover the vulnerability of the human being, as a conceptual armor for our fragility, affirmed without any detours by the artist. These visual motifs are the pretext of an antinomy between what the immediate existential context offers us and the lateral step that the artist takes, isolating herself under the protective aura of her world, where eternal youth, freedom and the idea of play disseminate the dreamlike reality and the melancholy of joy. For Carmen Olteanu, this utopia makes her indestructible from her direct, everyday experience. She likes to play with the image of dolls, but, this time, from the perspective of maturity and a sustained artistic experience, viewed through the generous visor of childhood, giving illusions “then” and involving retrospective affects on his own memory, “now”. Full-page figures or compositional ensembles evoking feminine delicacy, sometimes accompanied by a symbol from the realm of fairy tales, they do not only reflect masks, dolls and marionettes, but rather have to do with an automimesis, the portraits having tenderness, candour, femininity, as we can define the face and attitude of the artist herself. Loaded with strong colors and harmonies, the images testify to a painter with a career in full swing, focused as a discourse on a figurative adapted to her mastery, unveiled in portrait studies, in foreshortened bodies, in characters placed on the full page or represented in wholeness in various situations and structural contexts… With its own imagery arsenal and in the desire to move away from a nagging and harsh contemporaneity, it apparently introduces us to a new dimension of playful spirit, where the balance between childhood and the nostalgia of a past full of innocence and joy, comes to speak to us about release from constraints. But the artist is much deeper in the message transmitted, opening the window of a complex scenography, where the world is seen as a puppet theater, reiterating here the multiple facets of man, his multiplication through doubling and under the appearance of purity… Created in the image and likeness of man, the entities anthropomorphic figures are not only the reflection of our earthly ego, but show that, on a spiritual level, through transcendence, man has no existential limits. In reality, the artist’s desire to plastically play with the symbols of childhood and to return to the beginning highlights the nostalgia for times that she will no longer live with the feelings of that time, making her aware of the drama of ephemeral time, of the perishability of being and the illusion of the lost world.”
Ana Amelia Dinc