Review: Claudia Barbu

For all the force and expressiveness that Claudia Barbu's artwork gives off, it isn't easy to find a guiding thread in her output. That's the risk of eclecticism, of combining formal devices from different sources with varied, often jarring subjects. An orthodox observer would frown at the lack of anchors and clear artistic references. But who cares about orthodoxy in an age like ours, marked by the internet, anxiety and radical mixing? Not me, that's for sure.

The naked body and the expressive face are among the subjects the Romanian artist turns to. Formally she swings between the most brutal expressionism of Urbano and the eroticism of Morena. Other nudes of hers, on the contrary, hide the face, infecting the viewer with a touch of macabre irony. But Barbu's output also piles up paradise landscapes with dimmed light and gusting winds, bloody jellyfish and harmless flowers.

The screams of silence

In 2013, the Romanian artist exhibited at the Centro de Incubación Empresarial Milla Digital (CIEM) in Zaragoza, the city where she lives. Barbu chose the title «Los gritos del silencio» for that show. One of the most striking paintings from that exhibition can be found on Artelista. It's Paz in which an angelic-looking child with echoes of the ultra-famous Bansky carries a not at all angelic grenade. Against a background of bloody roughness, a village fights not to vanish. «Peace not War»? Maybe in another century…

Back in that 2013 exhibition, Claudia Barbu was already showing her interest in «faces with distinct, interesting features and personality». As we see in the pair of paintings Tiempo and Time, the Romanian artist uses faces in extreme close-up to disfigure their physical form with brushstrokes loaded with material.

The X angels

«X Angels» was another exhibition in Zaragoza, in 2014, marked by her characteristic eclecticism. In it we find artworks that convey a calm melancholy, like Washed Memories, with little to do with the bulk of her output. There's also room for eminently decorative paintings like Walking in Flowers or for the bloody Medusas.

But what drew the most attention in X Angels were artworks like Highlife or Higher, in which the Romanian artist makes the most of her leaning towards sensuality through undulating lines and warm colours, always with a strong presence of red. While in Higher the female figure in ecstasy is possessed by an internal rhythm, in Highlife the colours and lines break free from the body, creating a sensual rhythm that takes over the whole surface of the canvas.

The killer, the blind man and the disfigured one

«I think I have an urban style», said the painter (and designer, and a whole lot of other things) about the exhibition at the CIEM in Zaragoza. In 2016, Claudia Barbu takes another step in her career without giving up her characteristic eclecticism. Maybe «urban» is one way to put it, as in the painting of the same name. A face with an ecstatic gaze seems to be asking for a truce as it rises among a tangle of tower blocks.

If in Urbano the Zaragoza-based artist seems to be experimenting with cubism, in the interesting Wild Sea Barbu updates Picasso's blue period, setting aside her usual expressionism and letting herself be influenced by photographic realism. A very appealing painting that finds its flip side in the darker Bikini.

But Claudia Barbu seems to have settled in 2016 on one particular subject: in The Professional, Cirugía and Blind the faces are covered. The professional (a criminal one, we gather) carries a pistol and a balaclava and has his eyes closed. The same goes for the face in Cirugía, waiting patiently for the moment it can be freed from its mask. In Blind, meanwhile, the artist covers the figure's eyes outright, and all we can make out are a pair of sensual red lips.

In these latest artworks she tries to pin down a metaphorical idea, but what the viewer enjoys above all is the Romanian painter's skill at drawing which, with echoes of Egon Schiele, she pours into most of her artwork, always with the naked or half-naked human body as the lead.

«An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way». Claudia Barbu takes this line of Bukowski's as her own and stays on the lookout for the simplest way to convey the complexity of her formal and thematic universe. In the meantime, we get to enjoy artworks as formally powerful as the recent Bussinesman.