Tender Drawings about Love and Life · RVM Silvia Trăistaru

Silvia Trăistaru
Tender Drawings about Love and Life · RVM
 

Curator Adriana Oprea

Opening: November 8–9, 2025, 4:00–9:00 pm

Malmaison Studios – Open Doors 10
Room 30, Calea Plevnei 137C, Building B, 2nd Floor, Bucharest

Visiting period: November 8 – December 6, 2025

In her recent projects, artist Silvia Trăistaru (b. 1979) brings into play visual and written elements — line, sign, trace, drawing, painting, camera, textile, installation, word, and text — to speak about ecological consciousness, abortion and motherhood, the body, technological embodiment and digital media, the subconscious and the supra-human. As a professional art restorer as well, Silvia Trăistaru builds her images through drawing, which forms “the core of her artistic approach, the instrument through which she develops visual thinking,” and through language — the primary element in her latest series of works, where hatching becomes part of a broader technical repertoire that reveals, as in an involuntary psychic screenshot, visual analogies belonging to an entire universe of personal experience. 

Drawing and words help her elucidate these analogies and pathways, to build itineraries, traces, maps, personal configurations and geographies, emotional territories, and small intimate continents of the subconscious. Paper and textiles—as well as the photographic camera—serve as supports for the elaboration of imprints and explorations of memory. They sustain an imagery that thematizes, both critically and emotionally (in this case, synonymous terms), human liminal experiences—zones of crisis in the individual’s relationship with transpersonal systems (nature, corporeality and the finitude of life, the maternal, the animal, the non/supra-human).

A direction her latest drawing series have taken leads into one of the most contested, repressed, problematic, and problematized areas in contemporary art—an area against which this art itself functions in an antagonistic, iconoclastic, subversive, and intensely critical way. Yet it is not the deconstruction of the religious that directly interests Silvia Trăistaru; rather, her stance on the subject is ambivalent, complex, progressive, and processual, built over long periods—both older and recent—of life and artistic experience. The socially and traumatically sensitive conceptualism of her earlier works now openly refers—as if crystallized and transformed under the impact of this new theme related to the spiritual and religious — to empathy, gratitude, presence, the universe, faith, and death.

Thus, Room 30 at Malmaison Studios presents drawing portraits rendered in reference to names of religious cult figures, using the same basic language of writing and drawing—apparently narrative, but in fact transformed into declarations of attachment and emblems of contemplation. Starting from words, Silvia Trăistaru’s practice creates visual palimpsests that reveal and transcribe, through the force of unintentional snapshot effigies, layered analogies between recognizable experiences or images and the invisible. Adriana Oprea

Silvia Trăistaru (b. 1979) is a visual artist and independent restorer known for her interdisciplinary practice combining painting, drawing, photography, and textiles. Since 2021, she has been part of the artistic community at Malmaison Studios in Bucharest, where she works in Room 30. In 2005, she founded STart CONSERVATION, a studio focused on modern and contemporary art, building on her training in Conservation-Restoration at the National University of Arts, Bucharest. She collaborates with private collections, galleries, and auction houses in Romania and Europe, successfully combining the intellectual universe of art with the rigor of cultural heritage preservation.

Adriana Oprea (b. 1982) is the author of several essays and articles on Romanian contemporary art and has collaborated for over 20 years with artists, publications, and art institutions in Romania and abroad. Trained in art history, Adriana is a curator and art critic, a contributor to Arta magazine since its 2010 new 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 organized 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 (AICA) since 2013, she curates primarily projects by contemporary women artists.

Room 30 / Atelierele Malmaison is both the artist’s studio and the exhibition space for her new projects.

Acknowledgments: Radu Boeru (visual design), Sorin Dan Cojocaru (visual design), Edi Constantin (technical support)

Media partners: Empower Artists, Curatorial, Feeder, Modernism, Propagarta, Smark, Daily Magazine, Revista GOLAN, WOMAN, CRDA PRO Comunitate, IQads, HAPP, ArteVezi, AMOS NEWS, Zile si Nopti

Visiting schedule: Starting November 10, visits are by appointment only, via phone at 0721245456 or email at silvia.traistaru@gmail.com.