Anca Stefanescu | Avenue of Joy

Artist Statement

Anca’s practice includes painting, drawing, and collage, as well as fashion and art object design. Her artworks mirror the new paradigm of colour seen as light and life, as energy, and as a natural healer of the body. Combining elements from her imaginary world with a culture based on yogic traditions, her colourful works are both erratic and stable, ordered and chaotic. Her paintings merge the joy of simple gestures with the rigour of geometry in a complex dance between form and colour, the abstract and the figurative.

Mixing digital with oil painting, the viewer is drawn into the contrast between the clean, even, sterile computer lines and the shapes, colours, textures, tensions, and pulsations of oil paint applied on the surface. For Anca, these contrasts represent the links between people, the differences that make each individual unique and irreplaceable. Therefore, meticulous attention is paid to the depiction and inclusion of each individual detail.

She paints the human body avoiding stark mimesis. At the same time, the figures in her paintings are often depicted in a kaleidoscope of vibrant and hyper-saturated colours. The choice of colours has its foundation in the yogic concept of chakras. Just as the colours attributed to different chakras reflect specific internal states of mind, the colours chosen by the artist reflect specific moods and feelings interwoven together in all their complexity. Anca’s paintings therefore represent portraits of the individual as glimpsed from the inside, rather than from what transpires on the surface.