Sultana Maitec - Soare pe Rosu — GOLD

The choice of gold leaf as a predominant working material and the departure from the figurative almost overlapped in the biography of Sultana Maitec as an artist: up to a point, the very material imposed on the artist a certain stylistic demeanour in realising the composition of her works, starting with purification of forms, stylisation of the design, chromatic line, and establishment of dominant gilded surfaces. The portraits gradually gave way to a new series of works where the focal point will always be the oval voided of figurative content, with a perfectly delineated outline through which the sun itself enters the frame of the picture.

ABOUT sultana maitec

Among the Romanian post-war artists, Sultana Maitec had an exceptional destiny: trained in a period when socialist realism was the only artistic expression validated by the system, the artist decided a spectacular shift from the dominant trend, and chose to work in nonfigurative gold leaf painting – which became in fact her predominant media and her visual mark. The series of Suns and Pomonas will impose definitely Sultana Maitec as the „artist of gold”, a „cosmogonic gold, a sort of primordial substance”, the way Andrei Pleșu called it. During the „golden age” – as communism defined itself -, Sultana Maitec chose precisely gold as her main media: due to its nature, gold leaf directs the artist towards a stylized representation and a non-figurative approach; which meant that, through such an option, the artist took distance from any possible “visual compromise” with her epoch.