Criticism – Corneliu Antim, Art critic and historian

“Carmen Olteanu is a very young and attractive artist who had the privilege of a great education under the guidance of a valued master of the brush- painter Mirel Zamfirescu. Without being under his stylistic influence, the artist keeps from his study classes the respect for the rigour of the drawing and the almost hedonic appetite for the expressiveness of the forms, which is obvious especially in her portrait compositions, precise and crossed by a certain theatrical, histrionic emphasis, in the manner of the tradition of the great romantic painting. The elements that suggest this finding are the attitudinal hypostasis of the characters and especially the colour tonicity of meridional nature.

Carmen Olteanu affirms for the moment the fidelity to figurative painting. At the technical level, she still oscillates between the thorough hyper-realistic notation (often appealing to the props of photographic realism) and the free shaping, directly in colour of forms. The paintings are kneaded from the refined embrace of the paste, the transparent passages of the staining and the alternating elegance of light and penumbra, as in the series of harlequins and masks, but the artist approaches with sensitivity the compositional verve – in the line of good traditions – post-Andreescian of the local impressionism – and the landscape and flowers static. Genres in which her native sensuality translates into the succulence of the paste and the joy sometimes jovial, other times exotic of visual impression. ”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Corneliu Antim,
Art critic and historian

Share Post :