This preamble makes sense as long as Teona Toderel’s art is focused on themes such as water, fluid, and emotion. Her painting claims itself from a kind of magical realism, but without a clear pedigree. A painting that loves detail, but which does not reveal itself in its entirety, no matter how much we scrutinize it. Because the world that Teona Toderel depicts is always filtered through imaginary windows traversed by raindrops. An optical artifice that equally adds an authentic, real dimension, and blurs the viewer’s access to the world beyond the fluid. A world that we, the viewers – always situated on this other side – will continually try to enter.

Teona Toderel’s painting is centered on two major themes: the urban landscape and the portrait. Her cities are anonymous corners of the world, without clear landmarks (although most of them belong to the Levantine world), unfolding frugally beyond the imaginary window. The water filter sparingly reveals the reality (a carefully studied sparseness, certainly), reflected by the artist through the fluid aura, in careful atmospheric details. Then, as a counterpoint to the anonymous landscapes, the artist proposes portraits with characters whose identity is, if not recognized, then at least intuited by us. Anatomical and clothing details are rendered clearly, with an assumed stridency, articulated in saturated colors, in “Glam” atmospheres, reflected, or even distorted by the splashes in the foreground.

The exhibition brings together artist’s recent works, a selection that covers her main preoccupations related to urban themes, portraiture, chromatic intensities, dualities and above all – the common denominator of all works – water as a vehicle for various moods and feelings. A veritable inventory of fluid emotions.