“Fantastyfrolia: A Painted Tale With Tints of Marzipan,” the solo exhibition by Ioana Băltan, curated by Gilda Ghinoiu opened at IOMO Gallery on March 8th, 2024.
“Operating under the specific composition rules of the Cartoon Glam movement, where the human figure dominates the representation surface, Ioana Băltan succeeds in creating, through pictorial means, a guide to revisiting childhood memories. In her economy, she first isolates elements with symbolic charge – a unicorn, a lollipop, a bunny – and then organizes them into visual ecosystems governed by the laws of hyper-feminine aesthetics. Ioana’s imaginary map thus follows the inverse logic of the bildungsroman construction, whether literary or visual. If in bildungsroman the main character discovers the unknown, learns to manage the surrounding reality by developing new skills, and follows a linear narrative path with a beginning and an end, in Ioana Băltan’s series, he rediscovers the forgotten known, being confronted with childhood sequences subjected to the non-logic of emotional memory.
The linearity of the narrative is thus pulverized into fragments of randomly developed memories on large-sized surfaces, worked in oil on canvas. The viewer is served slices from the emotional archives of the artist, the archives of that illo tempore perfectly preserved under the flesh of the plastic dolls in the foreground. Ioana Băltan enhances the light of her compositions by juxtaposing desaturated tints with saturated ones. Naples yellow, strontium yellow, or thalo crimson pinks gain a high value index in the company of cobalt blue, magenta violet, and Chinese green. The rhythm of surfaces worked in ultra-saturated orange tones with burnt shadows transforms some compositions from static-representational to dynamic-narrative, presenting the doll-like characters in motion. Suddenly, the plastic fairies seem to move, thanks to the chromatic associations expressed by the artist.” Gilda Ghinoiu (excerpt from the curatorial text).
Ioana Băltan (b. Dragomirești, Dâmbovița) lives and works in London. She attended the courses of the National University of Arts, Bucharest, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in painting in 2015. In the same year, Băltan obtained the teaching preparation diploma issued by the same institution. She continued her studies at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, obtaining a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in 2017 and a fourth master’s degree in Creation Strategies in Painting issued by the National University of Arts, Bucharest. She has exhibited in London, Venice, Cairo, and Bucharest in solo or group shows.
Ioana Băltan’s paintings reveal the artist’s concern for contemporary approaches to the feminine figure. The large-sized compositions are conceived as a corpus of visual research on the portrayal of feminine archetypes, with a strong emphasis on how these subjects have been treated over time, whether as characters of angelic beauty, grotesque creatures, or, more recently, as animated simulacra. Ioana Băltan’s urban goddesses are surrounded by fantastic landscapes decorated with cosmic elements and enveloped in artificial lights.
