Playing with Colors. Irina Petraș
The Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca, a public institution of county interest operating under the authority of Cluj County Council, is organizing, between November 26 and December 7, 2025, the painting exhibition entitled Playing with Colors, signed by Irina Petraș. The official opening will take place on Wednesday, November 26, 2025, at 14:00, in the presence of Professor Dr. Lucian Nastasă-Kovács, manager of Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca, of Irina Petraș, her guests, and art historian Dr. Dan Breaz, curator of the exhibition.
On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening on November 26, 2025, the volume The Poems of Transylvania (Școala Ardeleană Publishing House, 2025) will also be presented, an anthology conceived by the renowned literary critic and essayist Irina Petraș, president of the Cluj branch of the Romanian Writers’ Union.
The second part of the opening will host a recital by the poets invited to this complex event, which brings together lyrical voices from all over Transylvania. The event is made possible thanks to the outstanding efforts of the Cluj branch of the Romanian Writers’ Union, Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca and the Școala Ardeleană Publishing House of Cluj-Napoca.
Through the exhibition Playing with Colors, Irina Petraș redefines the meaning of one of modernism’s canonical questions regarding the artistic identification of the most “real” reality. The severe formal essentializations in her newest works rediscover this reality in the neo-expressionist stylization of drawing, whose graphic qualities become accentuated and thus emblematic through a renewed capacity for suggestion. This same “reality” is also rediscovered in the evocative chromatic impastos whose layers of paint—worked with a palette knife or even through direct hand intervention—suggest the “embodiment” of beings and things, endowing them with an unusual aesthetic reality.
Both in this renewed power of suggestion and in the aforementioned unusual aesthetic reality of artistic representation, one can “read” a distinctive sensitivity characterized by the pleasure of imagining stories drawn from sensory perception of the world. Thus can be identified the traces of a personal mythology preserved through the force of memory, as well as of an intensely subjective experience, without allowing the conjunctural to alter either the reflective quality of the representations or their quality as emotional mirages, both serving as true catalysts for stylizations continuously hybridized with sensory frankness. The formal treatment places the artist Irina Petraș within the select family of connoisseurs of authenticity, who do not allow themselves to be constrained by fixed aesthetic formulas threatened by routine or “classicization,” nor seduced by various contemporary concerns that often besiege a painter’s mind as a receptor haunted by the ideological avalanches of the world we live in.
One of the dominant ideas of Irina Petraș’s new works is the dialogue between movement and stillness, life and death, brilliance and fading. The current artistic formulations in her works highlight a heightened sensitivity to the subjective springs of artistic creation, giving these pieces an authentic neo-expressionist sensibility that the artist herself identifies when, in an inspired artistic credo, she confesses her freedom of visual expression:
“All my exhibitions have had a certain unity, both the ten from the period 1976–1989 and the ten from my return to the easel after a quarter-century pause (Exercises in Light, Temporary Dwellings, Intermittences of Memory, Bacovian Themes, The Buzz of Colors, etc.). The transpositions onto canvas have always been, each time, a small experiment.
I have vivid memories from my first opening, in 1976, at the galleries of Tribuna magazine. I was introduced by D.R. Popescu. The second opening took place at the ‘Filo’ Galleries, run by Octavian Șchiau, the dean of the Faculty. I also exhibited at the Art Museum, at the University House, at the Steaua Galleries, at Scriptorium, etc.
Painting has always been my freest part. When writing I am somewhat more disciplined, more sober. But in painting, I follow no rule. I paint in the sun, on the south-facing balcony, or in the studio at the easel; with my fingers, with the palette knife—not with the brush—and I constantly innovate/search.
I never finish a painting. I only stop, that’s all. I paint nothing from nature. And, I admit, I cannot manage to capture on canvas the paintings I have in my head, the ones I see with the mind’s eye, in dreams or in waking life. Titles often suggest the connection with my ‘day-and-night readings.’ In Eminescu, Bacovia, Blaga, Goga, Arghezi, I can always find fragments of verse that can become titles, which briefly and comprehensively say what the painting should have said—and does not always manage to. Playing with Colors seems to me a very fitting title for my relationship with the canvases. It is play, joy, stepping out of the day’s rhythms, a colorful fall into thought.
Now I have chosen to give them the role of backdrop for the launch of a Transylvanian anthology.”
The entire exhibition itinerary stages the birth of images of light apparently cut out from an infinite quantity of black, so as to display the imaginative vibration of colors. The recent paintings of Irina Petraș demonstrate the versatile character of her art, which can be understood either as a projection of what will never be again or, on the contrary, of something that will always exist—a kind of eternal human condition within the ambience of living. Playing with Colors is, ultimately, an artistic metaphor for human existence seen at the intersection of personal mythology and the architectural frameworks in which we expect the human to (re)embody itself at any moment.
The exhibition Playing with Colors remains open to the public until December 7, 2025, from Wednesday to Sunday, between 10:00 and 17:00.
Presentation of the volume The Poems of Transylvania
The anthology The Poems of Transylvania began to take shape in 2018. There are now 150 names of all calibers, all ages, and from all over Transylvania.
The Transylvania in the poems of this anthology is about dwelling and homeland, about history and hardship, about landscapes and people of worth, about longing and desire, about pain and hope. It is solemn, yet also stirs lighthearted frivolities. It is a place of memory and a foundation for thinking the future. It is about solitude and community. About life in the long duration of a people and about everyday life, to which it gives contour and roots. About reconciliation and non-reconciliation. About people.
It does not close itself but is ready to grow at any time. Being Transylvanian, with roots in Maramureș and Sibiu, “at home” for me means places surrounded by forests and hills. The gaze does not halt or stumble at them, but rests on them, recognizes its landmarks, and can dream, in calm, of distant horizons.
