Art Critics
”…The image registers a certain generalization through color, but particularizes through graphical intervention. The chromatic substance shows harmony and luminosity, decorative feel and fineness, sensitive, translucent manifested. The graphical addition is accent and dynamism, necessary accent, bestows eloquence and cohesion, a gesture, a writing on top. The two components, chromatics and graphics, are downright complementary: a part half that can’t be without the other, expressing the way in which it lets itself become whole, the way in which is complete. Therefore we deal with a “duo” that isn’t of the individualistic type, but we deal with a dualism that is complete in itself. Just as Yin-Yang where a structure exists only to complete the other, the present half automatically reveals the other. The present one makes way to the one that comes in, the color prepares the line entry, and the local chromatic makes way to the linear run. Between the chromatic half and graphic half, between background and form, substance and essence, takes place in fact the birth of a final image.
…This peace of art isn’t hurt over the surface’s reign, or by its bi-dimensional hegemony, but on the contrary it arranges this way the more efficient rhythm of forms, the rhythm of colors in cadence allegro, somewhat up bit. Thus giving way to the possibility that when the suggestion of frontality makes its presence sensed, a vague effect of farness could appear and when the horizontality is suggested, the effect of a diffuse elevation could appear. Through these peaces of art, one can only gain height or distance in space, evidently the space of senses. Maria Balea had this painting communicate something that one can feel in the same way when helped by the one that sees things in their essence and transform them into conditions of state. In other words things becoming forms in abstract and independent colors, free forms and colors one can reach…”
Ioan Iovan, Art critic
”,…The plasticity of the paintings signed by Maria Balea consists in the inventive and successful combining of elements, patterns, fragments, textures and colour stains. The paintings surprise us especially by the ingenious and refined stratification of the chromatic sections, of the optical structures, by the richness of shades, as well as by the variety of the plastic signs in their way to coagulate, crystallize and appear. The artist, who lives and works in Arad, appeals mostly to essential, simple and discreet forms, components and elements, which she handles economically, with an overflowing confidence, as well as to a limited chromatic palette, laconic, slightly blurred, using a discreet, delicate harmony. The rhythm of the colours, the connexions between the structures are managed and orchestrated in a symphonic manner, separated in multiple and elevated shades and tones. Maria Balea shows a chromatic sense sensible to harmony but she doesn’t avoid bold or surprising associations. She knows well the grammar of forms and this allows her to emphasize strongly and in a convincing manner the suggestive force of her compositions…”
János Szekernyés
”…In her canvas there are put together in a doze, with a careful balance, the spot with the line, the opaque with the transparent, the energetic liberty of a disciplined gesture, rigour of a knife trait, and a sort of arrangement in equal parts on the plates of an imaginary scale, Hartung’s upspring gesture and the feature of Soulange’s or Bisiere’s knife trait. All over this mixture of lines and spots, hovers the spirit of a wish to gather the image together, to coagulate the inner energies. The painting with a sort of autonomy type “greenberg-yan”, builds upon the permanent consideration of its concrete limits, upon laterals of squares and triangles, and also upon its inmost trama. Every composition organizes in itself the dynamic of inner energies under the two-dimensional sign, a characteristic of modern painting.
…Maria Balea’s paintings give the viewer an impression of a window with semi-transparent curtains. The dialect of the suggestion ‘secret-revealed’ gives charm to her paintings. Every inner start suspected of going out of the order, is suppressed to a process of silencing of placement in the register of subtilization and the refinement of nuances and translucency.
But the mixing modalities are also extended through incorporation into the painting’s economy, the textile collage, the veil, integrated of course organically into the compositional terrain. The fine textures of collaged knit, enriches the array of expression on canvas, where the texture valorization of the canvas support, is amplified by the concreteness of the collaged painting.
An air of purity is given by its whites and the margins obedient to the touches of flame, fills the painting with dramatic accents.
This ambiguity played by opacities and transparences, things hidden and fragments of surfaces that are clear, by the relation between line and spot, flat tend and writing, rigour and freedom of the gesture, picture and collaged textile, gives Maria Balea’s painting the charm and personality.
A painting that defines…’’
Onisim Colta, artist
,, Nothing forced, nothing short of value, and nothing ostentatious. It can be observed that the artist expresses herself in the context of a well articulated formula, sustained by endowment and complex cumulative personal experience. Sort of memory slides, delicate and translucent, a painting with equivalence of specific engraving performances…” alternated with insertions of matter-textures, even collages (pointing to or descending from coloengraving) signs and letters, in essence a free writing, all orchestrated and composed with much refinement.
…The chromatics, with axis predominately on gray, rich through nuances of a remarkable delicacy, has served to a specific painting “of state”, in which the artist, although set on a structure ‘type-repere ’, lets say premeditated, remains permanently participant, with maximum implication and freshness, commemorating somehow sequences from a deeply perceived and assimilated reality, like an ace of improvised music, to give more of a clear and communicative stance of these analytical insertions we propose.
…An art of quality, or with authentic support, can be verified at the level of an informed receptor, through a definable and extremely simple test. If at first traverse-glance it impresses you or even shocks you, then possibly presents expressive centers of interest, an aspect one can verify, after a pause, and with a new vision. Many times, a second look could constitute a deception to the viewer – revealing the void behind the images.
If, on the contrary, repeated viewing reveals new facets of sensibility and mastery that draws you in more and more, that means the artist (true and not fake) got something to say, enchanting us in fact, with this rich and specific beauty of a well articulated plastic art language, as well as by the intensity of the involvement into this work of art.
Ciprian Radovan, artist