Born in Bucharest, the great painter Doina Botez, who recently passed away, had been living in Rome for over thirty years .
Her artistic career had developed through graphics, scenography, illustration until she became one of the most important painters in Europe and worldwide.
The quality of her art was accompanied by a profound feeling of moral, intellectual and social commitment which had characterized her as one of the most intense figures of civil passion against any dictatorial constraint and of dedication to free women and men from addiction against blackmail and violence that lead to the oblivion of resignation.
Refined interpreter of civil and human values to which one’s future must be anchored.
– Memory of a recent experience (Rome 2019)
– Memory of a recent experience (Rome 2019) Presentation video
– Memory of a recent experience. Review by Giovanni Lauricella
– Memory of a recent experience (presentation)
– Centenary of the birth of Romania (1918-20) WE GIL (Rome)
– The body of the image. Presentation to the Senate of the book by Doiuna Botez published by SKIRA
– Alchemies of the soul: the myth and its metamorphoses
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Below is the presentation by the director of Quaderni Radicali and Agenzia Radicale of the exhibition Memories of a recent experience
Freedom against the oblivion of resignation
by Giuseppe Rippa
Memories of a recent experience moves on two levels that inevitably intersect. At the center is freedom and its moral, intellectual, social, political limitation, which arises from dictatorial constraint but also from people’s resignation and addiction to blackmail, to the violence of authoritarian tendencies against which the common man does not find the energies and strength to oppose but against which at a certain point he decides to oppose to escape the oblivion of resignation.
The illustrations of a booklet of poems for children, which Doina Botez created for the Romanian poet Ana Blandiana in the late eighties, are a delicious and clear synthesis of courage and firmness with which the artist, in the depths of her vocation for autonomy and reaction to constraints, captures the purity of the tale to insert the signs of a firm and irreducible dissent, inserting hidden and invasive figures who, in the image of animals, people, objects, photograph the oppressive threat of a totalitarian regime.
This „provocation” of hers will be banned by the Ceausescu regime, she will no longer be allowed to illustrate anything else…
The other level is proposed in the paintings that connect to the rhinocentite that Eugène Ionesco, in his Theater of the Absurd, describes as the apparently surreal metamorphosis in which people are transformed to the point of yielding in the face of authoritarian and totalitarian models.
„I’ve been feeling tired for years…! I make such an effort dragging my carcass around.” And shortly after: „I always have the impression that my body is made of lead… as if I were carrying another on my shoulders. I can’t be aware of myself… I don’t even know if it’s really me”. Thus the playwright makes one of the characters speak of him, prey to a paralysis of resignation.
Well, Doina Botez pays homage to Ionescu, who felt oppressed by individuals who have become rhinoceroses, with works that tell of a sort of rupture of this suffering. It is his yearning for freedom and for the struggle to achieve it that he does not stop before an obsessive and dehumanizing pressure.
Memory, as Sciascia reminded us, to be cultivated to define a civil commitment that escapes passivity and nourishes the hope and will to bring out the civil and human values to which to anchor one’s future…
Sursa: Agenzia Radicale