A Tribute to Madonna: Solstice of the Divine Feminine

Curatorial Statement by Francesco Caprioli, Art Advisor, Venice, Italy

More than two years have passed since Balan's spiritual work Madonna was acquired for the church of Cornesti in Moldova.

The artist's Koiné has had time to evolve in the ascetic direction of its premises. Collective rebirth, inspired transformation, are the leitmotifs of the twelve works by Cristina Balan exhibited in the “solo" at the Art Nou 277 Gallery in Barcelona, in conjunction with the summer solstice of 2025.

Art as a vital drive, as pure energy. The artist in search of the vortex intended as a "peak of maximum energy". If the assumptions are the same that animated the British avant-garde in the early years of the “dark century”, the path as well as its conclusions are diametrically opposed to that intense and contradictory experience of Vorticism that animated artists such as David Bomberg, Wyndham Lewis and post Cubist Helen Saunders.

Balan does not resort to grim, harsh expressive styles, to swirling logical geometries; if anything, her research is wrapped in an abstraction that is already totalizing right from the early germinal stages of her artistic production, made up of more rounded or soft lines, inspired by a sense of irrational illogic, which is in clear antithesis with the dictates of vorticism, to its rough anthropomorphism, like a cocoon from which to free itself, a chrysalis that aspires to abandon its larval state.

The result of this path allows us to immerse ourselves in Balan's Vortexes, which investigate the relationship with contemporary life with renewed intensity, but putting the natural process back at the center rather than the primacy of machines. The drives are no longer those of a technological progress that belongs to the astonishment induced by the industrialization of the last century, but if anything they are to be sought within a universe that is also spiritual, which the mechanism of the signatories of the Blast manifesto had totally ignored, clouded from their justifiable thirst for progress.

Immaculada, Mother of Creation, Mona, Venus, Ascension, Blessing, Golden Heart, Mother’s Heart, Dancing Venus, Mother with Child: these are the names of the displayed artworks, united into a common geometric logic, inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, a pure sense of divine that radiates the spirit and spreads into nature.

The optical and circular illusion of Balan's works envelops us and forces our mind to rotate in a perennial and universal motion; it generates a centripetal movement which is also an illusion, an illusion of reality, true, great, unresolved anxiety of the contemporary world.