​Suzana Dan – ZART

Since four years ago we can speak of a new generation of young artists. That generation is composed of those artists who studied in the 90’s and now had reached the full artistic maturity. In painting, for example, the change of tone is already a reality. The 90’s were marked by the painting with a neo-orthodox approach. Vaults, crosses, crowns, or pillars, those were the iconographical themes of the end of the century in Romanian painting. If those themes didn’t motivate you as a painter, you could always find an escape route in nature: paintings that showed windows that reached for the tranquility of nature or paradise-like gardens that possessed that kind of religious “giving away all vanities” feeling. If the neo-orthodox (or neo-traditionalists) painting was recuperating, even without knowing, the late modernist legacy, the new generation of artists are much more interested in the realities of a consumer society that is taking shape now in Romania. The new generation is recuperating the legacy of Pop-art by trying to nourish themselves from a strong pictorial tradition as well. The themes tend to be different, the style is different and the colors are different too. In painting we can see a chromatic revival. The colors become vivid and they tend to free themselves from a long-preached academic austerity. Suzana Dan represents this new wave in painting. Influenced by Frida Khalo and Henri Rousseau but also by Pop-art, she is one of the most daring painters of her generation. She can make you laugh and forget that you live in a grey urban environment. (Dan Popescu)