“Beautiful madness” from the subconscious of the artist Dana Todor, exhibited at the Delta Gallery

Dana Todor’s paintings are not easy. Although they seem playful, they always hide a deep story. The more you look, the more you discover a truly hypnotizing, but above all hallucinatory world, as if coming from the deepest corner of the subconscious, there on the border with the unconscious. She manages to detach them and bring them, through paints, here in our world. A whole collection of images from this “world beyond” was brought together in an exhibition whose opening took place on Wednesday, May 8, at the Delta Gallery.

“Madmen’s Recreation” – a map of one’s own “madnesses”

Although she titled the exhibition “Crazy recreation”, Dana Todor wanted to emphasize from the beginning that it is not a reference to people with mental problems, but an x-ray of the inner self, of all the states, feelings and thoughts that make her what she is. It is.

“The idea doesn’t relate to crazy people as people with problems, that’s out of the question. It’s about some characters that I bring from somewhere behind, from a niche area of ​​mine, from the subconscious. Some are more likeable, some less likeable, they are part of me. I’m used to making these incursions quite often between the part of me and myself”the artist told us.

“Recreation” thus refers to the therapeutic way in which Dana Todor brings her art to life, with each line of paint organizing her thoughts, releasing them from the subconscious onto the canvas.

“A Complex Polychrome Menagerie” / “A Fragrant Madness”

The curator of the exhibition was associate professor Dr. Gabriel Kelemen, from the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara, who was his teacher during his master’s degree. He confessed that he was pleasantly surprised by the professional and creative trajectory of the artist.

“What we see here today is an event that shows consistency, originality, we are dealing with a route that has been discovered. Dana is privileged, she found what to do (…). Dana has the courage to do what is not beautiful. She has long gone beyond this callophilic idea, but not worthy of condemnation, because many condemn callophilia – no, callophilia is related to the harmonies of nature, to the beautiful dream – she brings us something very interesting, provocative, and of utmost importance: it probes in the unfathomable darkness of the human psyche, at the border between I, self and soul. Which of the three is in the plane immediately below or below the level of consciousness. Somewhere in this area of ​​the dream, of the nightmare, he moves in a very complex personal phantasm. I would associate it very tangentially, and not obediently, with the symbolic route. We see fine, refined, distilled paraphrases: you see Munch, Odilon Redon, or even Otto Dix, he has something from the fabulous world behind the curtain. They are intimate spaces, with a certain promiscuity that belongs to the world of the circus, it does not fall into the surreal, but moves tangentially with a self-confession of the hidden, anxious territories, of one’s own identity route”, is the opinion of university professor Dr. Gabriel Kelemen.

The curator called the exhibition “a complex polychrome menagerie”, through which the artist gathered a set of questions through which she interrogates herself. Even if many of the works on simes convey tumult, aggression, they also hide tenderness, a recurring theme being the mother and the child.

“Try to think of the fabulous animal prop. The human animal, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” is very close to this desired and identity change… Think about genetically modified animals and all this identity turned in the sometimes immoral mirror, or progressive, depending on how you see it. In any case, it is a beautiful madness, or a very beautiful madness. I’ll let you judge it with your own cognition and I’m very glad that we found ourselves in the Delta Gallery”, also said university associate. Dr. Gabriel Kelemen.

• Read also: INTERVIEW: The art created by Dana Todor strips the world of all the layers of falsehood and reveals the deepest corners of the human being · Special Arad