The
Travel from Religious to Spiritual Art
After graduating her Theology studies in Iasi, Romania, Ioana Luca began two travels. A spontaneous, real travel to Germany and an inner, profound travel of finding herself. The first one took her far away from her home and from her roots and the other one made it possible for her to get closer to herself, to her soul. She choosed Düsseldorf after she gave up an alternative, a third travel, to Paris. A choice that just apparently seems to be made by chance; observing the great number of works created in Ioana Luca’s studio in Düsseldorf and thinking about her search for a style and for spirituality, we could understand Paris like a lost metropolis of the impressionism, like a nostalgic legend impregnated of literature and washed-out from clichées, so, probably not the best place for the new artistic beginning of Ioana Luca.
On the other side, Germany, with its rough nihilism, but also with a very lively art scene, seems to promise more freedom for creativity.
The contrasts could not be stronger as they are. Ioana Luca comes from the conservative society of Romania, from a culture with deep roots in religion and old traditions and who’s modern development was blocked from the comunism. She comes to Germany, the country who brought out the expressionism and where great artists suffered many humiliations in the times of the third Reich, and who presents itself today in a stylistic pluralism: from the brutality of the plastic code of Norbert Kricke to the artistic stagings as political affirmations of Jörg Immendorf or to the “picassoresques” works of Markus Lüpertz.
The end of Ioana Luca’s studies
demanded from her a reinforcement, a deepening of her creativity and spirituality
through an apparent distance, through a travel into the unknown, stylistic
and geographic. From this distance she sees her own roots (personal, artistic
and intelectual) more clear. The distance makes possible a more clear,
deep and consequent analysis, socialy such as psychologicaly, of the ever
present question: “Where do I come from? Who am I? Where am I going
to?”. A philosophical, a psycho-analysing and, of course, a religious
question. The works of Ioana Luca ask this question again just only by
their simple existance in the world. They appear silent, solitaire, mysterious,
obscure. From place to place break through pieces of gold like fragments
of an image, like the gold from an old, gone time. They tell sometimes
about silence, sometimes about movement and sometimes about defeat.
They convince about the impossibility and the lack of wish to explain
the world – that is the way they manifest themselves in their own
existance. Ioana Luca’s works are more materialised silence than
loud messages. The materials are wood, textile, wax, dead leaves, egg-shells,
found pices of objects, everything that apparently seems to have no use
anymore…and oil, watercolour, ink, gold.
In 2002, after Ioana Luca dedicated herself for many years, with intensity, to the icon painting, big oil paintings come into beeing in her studio from Düsseldorf, one by one, with very intensive colours, unusually bright, full of light and convincing of a great capacity of abstraction. After countless paperworks, overpaintings, she finds a new interpretation of the old artistic contents using a new language, a new artistic code. And she returns also to the familiar materials: wood, wax, gold. In the nature Ioana Luca gathers together dead leaves, sometimes stones, things that once they are in the studio they go through a process, with other words they know a metamorphose.
Ioana Luca doesn’t let herself leaded by a stylistic rule because she already knows this experience. The liberation from stylistic dogmas corresponds to her clear way of thinking and to her curiosity.
Like Ioana Luca went on this travel from a country to the other, from a culture into the other, letting her life go from immobility into movement, so her art is a permanent, never ending travel towards the Unkown.
(Detlev Foth – painter, Düsseldorf)