Ion Voicu

Creative Fantasy

We have the opportunity to admire the works of the ceramist Lucretia Milea and those of Ligia Popescu Balaj a tapestry creator. The two artists members of the Fine Arts Union of Ploiesti branch are well-known to the admirers of the beautiful from the previous exhibitions they had in Ploiesti and in Bucharest on which occasions some of their works have been bought.

What the two personal exhibitions have in common is undoubtedly their inner spirit of respect for the genuine national tradition. Folk art skills and specific materials are taken over and worked with and upon. They are “melted” in the personal creation laboratory in such a manner that the marks of originality endow their whole work with the much desired passport to the universe of fine arts.
This time we witness again a wonderful creative fantasy in Lucretia Milea's works. There is no hindrance in her inventive spirit even if the geometrical forms are only the basic ones: the square, the sphere, the cylinder. We seem to be the witnesses of an exuberant game, the “respirations” being called “Interferences”, “Triptych”, “Butterfly”, “Column”, “Windows”, and preparing other interferences between spheres and cylinders. The game of the geometrical forms of the lines and volumes materialize themselves in astonishing static embodiments.
In most of the cases the ceramists observe the yet not-written low of the equilibrium kept between utilitarism and decorativism. But Lucretia Milea's overflowing fantasy helps her to break it as well as Ligia Popescu Balaj does. The works in this exhibition freed from their utilitarian household mission so very obvious in the folk art exhibitions of the genre are stimulating the visitors' imagination, who are invited here to discover inner meanings and harmonies that only genuine art can contain and suggest.