Childhood Memories (diptych) 2011

Iurie Matei’s diptych ‘Childhood Memories’ is an enigmatic work, painted with oils in an illustrative style. Look at the way Matei builds up thin layers of blue paint to create the images of the figures and sky. The paint seems to blur the boundary between sky, water, and memories. See how the artist’s brush dances across the canvas, evoking a sense of light and movement in the clouds. What was Matei thinking when he created this? Perhaps he was contemplating the transition from youth to adulthood, innocence to experience. There’s an interesting conversation happening here between the two panels, mirroring and inverting each other. The girl in the left panel is lost in her own thoughts and tears, while in the right, she is held safely by the old man. I wonder if that figure is a future version of herself, or perhaps her father. Artists like Matei help us to see the world through a different lens, reminding us that painting is a form of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity and multiple meanings.