Florina Breazu

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F.B. Profile © Toporaş online art gallery

Florina Breazu’s abstract expressionism captivates with startling colours and unordinary shades of light that produce at first blush sensations of warmth and cold, closeness and distance. At the next stage, her gestural paintwork offers the spectator meanings evoked by her avant-garde style.

‘Abstract painting is a form of my freedom. It allows me to discover different realities in my inner life, in its cognitive or intuitive spaces, rather than reproducing the visible reality,' says the artist. ‘It is like a flight. It is me without any restriction.’

Breazu committed herself to abstract painting after Moldova declared independence in 1991. She was in her final year at the College of Fine Arts in Chisinau and found herself lucky to be able to form as an artist in a period of total freedom of expression. Had the Soviet Union not broken apart, it is uncertain whether she would have been able to follow her dream: this manner of artistic expression flourished openly after the totalitarian regime fell.

Breazu also studied decorative art in Romania. That is why in some of her paintings she is predisposed to decorate the main idea with patterns or characters. But they are used not excessively, only in accordance with the colours and values needed for her concepts.

The main source of inspiration for Breazu is books on Romanian medieval culture, philosophical and religious thought. Yet her paintings give one a feeling of the unpredictable and the spontaneous –- as, for example, in the passage through an alternative universe that she tries to reproduce in a recent work entitled The Gate of Stars.

The intent of this painting is to renew the connection between civilisations. The image is perceived as a time portal within which civilisations coexist in parallel, when the elements of the material world become immaterial, fluid, and transparent, without the consistency that would allow them to flow in a timeless stream in which past, present and future can be interwoven.

Breazu never knows what exactly is going to come out in the end. She usually works in series, trying to develop her idea entirely, each time applying a new formula and a new artistic language.

'When you explore an idea entirely for a new series of paintings, at the end you can free yourself of it and let it go', the artist says.

Breazu’s artistic journey has passed through different periods. At first, the gestures in applying the colours on a surface were predominant. Then her artistic impulse calmed as she started working in larger formats, applying the colours more evenly. In some of her series she also used graphic elements, lines without real forms just to suggest a character or a profile or a pattern.

Her most recent works are a combination of those formulas that show a relation between perceptions of the form and the soul, the word and the thought.

Breazu views her artistic journey as fulfilling her destiny to make an impact on people’s lives, offering a way to put aside the excessively rational, which does not permit us to be sensitive, and to contemplate more fully the spiritual that often lies hidden behind mere appearance.