As If It Were Real, the solo exhibition by artist Anca Brânzaș, curated by Lorelai Mursa, can be visited at Meron Gallery in Cluj-Napoca until March 3. The exhibition brings together a series of recent works that investigate emotion as a form of truth, articulated through an expressive and intense painterly language in which vulnerability, tension, and intuition become central tools of the artist’s practice.

“As If It Were Real brings together a series of artworks by Anca Brânzaș in which the figures and scenes seem simultaneously familiar and unexpected. Her paintings are populated by ambiguous figures – childlike, theatrical, hybrid – captured in frames charged with tension and emotion. Anca Brânzaș artworks with an expressive pictorial language, in which the gesture remains visible and the form is deliberately unstable. Bodies are deformed and the faces take a mask-like quality. Beyond the playful appearance, a profound tension and intense emotion are gradually revealed.

Animals, humans, mythological creatures and symbols compose a universe of intimate fables, suggested rather than described. Color functions as an emotional force, oscillating between delicacy and intensity, between tenderness and threat. Painting becomes an intuitive process, guided by the artist’s inner necessity, not by rational constructions.

In Anca Brânzaș’s works, the body is simultaneously a space of vulnerability and resistance. The exhibition refuses comfort or resolution, inviting the viewer into a suspended state, where game turns into confrontation and fantasy becomes a tool for finding deeply human anxieties.” (curatorial text)