LUDUS by Maia Oprea

"Charlie Chaplin once told Jean Cocteau that after the film will be finished <<the tree must be shoken>> in order to keep only what remains on the branches". (Rudolf Arnheim, "Art and visual perception", own translation)
The "LUDUS" project was developed during 2009 in an effort to ignore, in relation to the aesthetics, this principle of parcimony. It is also evidence of a certain age in my painting, an age at which I will probably never return. Age at which we want to eat all the apples and never shake one tree.
Apparently a number of leading threads, of hidden stories, and yet no, the story never begins. In „Ludus” the only importance lies in the joy of storytelling. There is no actual narration, but a play of meanings drawn from disparate elements. What unites these elements are precisely their differences in spatial planes, in artistic structure and in their intent of autonomy, thus generating a variety of irrational conflicts.
As a mention, all these paintings have been realised after live models (including myself), and not after photographs. The models ranged from people I barely knew to friends I’ve known for a long time. During the painting sessions I have always asked them to talk a lot, thus their words highly influenced my figurative initial compositions. I thus consider these models to be secondary authors of these works.