The exhibition “Tender Drawings about Love and Life · MRV” by Silvia Trăistaru, curated by Adriana Oprea, is open at Atelierele Malmaison until December 6, 2025.
“In her recent projects, artist Silvia Trăistaru (1979) brings into play a wide range of visual and script-based tools—line, mark, trace, drawing, painting, camera, textile, installation, word, and text—to address ecological consciousness, abortion and motherhood, the body, technological embodiment and digital media, the subconscious and the supra-human. Also a professional art conservator, Trăistaru builds her images through drawing, which forms ‘the core of her artistic approach, the instrument through which she develops her visual thinking,’ and through the written word—the primary element of her latest series of works, where hatching becomes part of a broader technical repertoire. Through this, visual analogies emerge, as if in an involuntary psychic capture, revealing a universe shaped by personal experience. Drawing and words help her clarify these analogies and pathways—constructing itineraries, traces, maps, personal configurations and geographies, affective territories, and small intimate continents of the subconscious. Paper, textiles, and photography provide the material support for imprinting and problematizing memory. They uphold imagery that thematizes, both critically and emotionally (in this case synonymous), extreme human experiences—zones of crisis in the individual’s relationship with trans-personal systems (nature, corporeality and the finitude of life, the animal realm, the non-/supra-human).
A direction opened by her latest series of drawings leads into one of the most contested, repressed, problematic, and problematized areas of contemporary art—a field that contemporary practice often approaches antagonistically, iconoclastically, subversively, and critically. Yet Silvia Trăistaru is not directly interested in deconstructing the religious, even if her own position on the subject is ambivalent, complex, progressive, and processual, shaped by long periods—older and more recent—of life and artistic experience. Her socially and trauma-sensitive conceptualism now openly invokes—as if crystallized and transformed under the weight of its new spiritual and religious thematics—empathy, gratitude, presence, universe, faith, and death. Thus, Camera 30 of Atelierele Malmaison presents graphic portraits built around names from religious cults, created through the same basic language of writing and drawing—seemingly narrative, yet in fact transformed into declarations of attachment and emblems of contemplation. Beginning with words, Trăistaru’s practice generates visual palimpsests that betray and transcribe, as if through the force of unintended effigies, overlapping analogies between recognizable and invisible experiences or images.” — Adriana Oprea
Silvia Trăistaru (b. 1979) is a visual artist and independent conservator known for her interdisciplinary practice that blends painting, drawing, photography, and textiles. Since 2021, she has been part of the artistic community at Atelierele Malmaison in Bucharest, where she works in Camera 30. In 2005, she founded STart CONSERVATION, a studio dedicated to modern and contemporary art, building upon her training in Conservation-Restoration at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. She collaborates with private collections, galleries, and auction houses across Romania and Europe, bringing together intellectual-artistic inquiry with the rigor of safeguarding cultural heritage.
Author of numerous essays and articles on Romanian contemporary art, Adriana Oprea (b. 1982) has collaborated for over 20 years with artists, publications, and art institutions in Romania and abroad. Trained as an art historian, she is a curator and art critic, a contributor to Arta magazine since its new 2010 series, and a museographer at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest since 2006. At MNAC, she coordinated the production of several solo and group exhibitions between 2014 and 2017 and continues to oversee the museum’s documentary archive dedicated to contemporary art. A member of the International Association of Art Critics since 2013, she primarily curates projects by contemporary women artists.
Camera 30 / Atelierele Malmaison is the artist’s studio and the exhibition space dedicated to her ongoing projects.
