Today’s Painters at Balchik

The “Today’s Painters at Balchik” art camp, organized by the ELITE ART Association, brings together since 2003 the creation of contemporary artists in an archive of stylistic expression, each participating artist approaching in his characteristic style the diversity of reasons for analysis and representation that Balchik offers.

Between March the 21^st and April the 15^th 2022, Elite Art Gallery organizes an exhibition of the work created during the “Painters of Today at Balchik” camp, the 2021 edition, with the following participating artists: Ammar Alnahhas, Gabriela Culic, Daniela Grapă, Laurențiu Midvichi, Manuell Mănăstireanu, Sergiu Grapă and Vasile Rață , reconstructing on canvas or paper, landmarks from the picturesque universe of Balchik, fragments of a place full of light, beauty, history.

“Nature has long been a subject that artists have been inspired by. Worthy of admiration, nature represents the spark of light of man in his constant search for meanings, Balchik becoming in this sense an oasis, not only of inspiration for artists, but also of reflection on indefinite states. The collective works are translated into a puzzle that manages to frame an essence of symbols, of the play of color and meanings, which seem to contain a promise of inner integrity, of a dialogue between the painter and the viewer. Abundant in imaginative force, the paintings are both the result of a careful look at the wonderful space to which Balchik invites you, but also an image that penetrates a contemplation of the artist’s indistinct horizon. The cohesion between the highest capacities that art can offer for the understanding of the plastic means of expression brings together through this exhibition a stylistic variety, technical diversity and complex development. Inspiration is everywhere in the little heavenly corner of Queen Mary’s Castle. Thus, each artist discovered through his own sense, the penetrating atmosphere of each particle that composes the place of the queen’s soul.

With a refined sense of observation and an authentic involvement in the relationship with her own creation, Gabriela Culic gives expression to her inner vision, which is in a permanent curiosity to look for answers in her own creation. Ammar Alnahhas proves to be a painter in search of beauty, the color having multiple meanings for him. Natural structures become forms of visual expression, as extensions that the natural element transmits to the viewer, each color suggesting the intensity and strength of nature’s pulse, as if the whole being merged with the surrounding element. For Daniela Grapă, the works become an infusion of symbols of emotion, leaving only the painting to express what her soul knows. The graphic designer Sergiu Grapă describes himself by an accuracy and clarity of his works, in which his own cosmogony comes to life in his construct “to be, to exist and to create”. Manuell Mănăstireanu’s painting can be described as types of states and feelings that intertwine with the external universe, contextualizing in his canvases both the intensity of emotions and the fragile balance of man, time, society in which we live, inviting introspection and understanding personal searches. Laurențiu Midvichi is the painter in search of another meaning, an artist of both the holiday, for which color, spontaneity is based on the relationship between creativity and the practical sense of man. Characterized by a side to understand the meaning of existence, Vasile Rață experiences through his paintings personal ways of penetrating the multitude of possibilities that painting offers. Through vibrant touches and a specific expressiveness that leave the references of the concrete world, he combines in his works the sensory and the imaginative.

The visual interposes itself with the resonance of the space that acquires through painting multiple perspectives in the essence of the artist’s spirit, the creative camp from Balchik being always an opportunity to discover and rediscover both the marine and the inner atmosphere”.