39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in
Loredana Popescu Tăriceanu’s solo show, hosted in the historic Altes Dampfbad in Baden-Baden, offers a phenomenological investigation into fragility and the boundaries of organic representation. Under the title The Silence of Petals, the project proposes a deconstruction of the floral motif, transforming it from a traditional subject into a field of research on transparency and pure pictorial gesture.
In her practice, Loredana Popescu Tăriceanu explores the duality between control and the unpredictable. Watercolor, as a medium of absolute fluidity, becomes here a tool for analyzing the ephemeral, articulated around an ontological dialogue between water and light. The artist does not seek to fix the image of the flower as a static object, but to capture the dynamics of its formation. Pigment and water merge in a process of self-generation on the surface of the paper, where negative space (the white of the support) plays an active role, defining volume through absence. This "writing with water" allows petals to appear not as solid entities, but as suspended chromatic events, where light is extracted directly from the unaltered purity of the medium.
The artist's works function as a filter between the immediate reality of the Baden-Baden gardens and their immaterial essence. It is an aesthetic of fragility that refuses noise, preferring instead the subtle vibration of color. Through this process of controlled sedimentation, the image becomes a trace of the passage of time—an archaeology of the moment when the pictorial medium stops moving to make room for a visual silence that invites introspection.
The exhibition's curatorial tension is amplified by the formal contrast between the immateriality of the compositions and the neoclassical rigor of the Säulensaal. The verticality of the stone columns in Altes Dampfbad provides a solid structural frame for the fluidity of the vegetal forms, creating a dichotomy between architectural permanence and the transitory nature of the pictorial gesture. In this space of the former thermal baths, water returns symbolically—not as a therapeutic resource, but as an aesthetic agent capable of fixing light in delicate layers of visual memory.
The Silence of Petals invites reflection on silence as a deliberate act of perception. Loredana Popescu Tăriceanu demonstrates that visual power does not reside in opacity, but in the capacity to let light traverse the pictorial plane, transforming the gaze into an exercise of absolute balance.
Curator: Diana Dochia, PhD
