Landscape at Eforie 1971

Vasile Dobrian’s ‘Landscape at Eforie’ is an arrangement of geometric forms in a landscape. I can almost see Dobrian building up this scene, shifting blocks of colour, and searching for balance. There’s a tension here between flatness and depth. The surface feels matte and chalky, like distemper, but the overlapping planes create a feeling of space. I wonder if he was thinking about early modernist painting, like Cezanne, or maybe even the flattened perspectives of Byzantine mosaics. Look at that green parallelogram cutting across the composition. It’s like a ray of light, or maybe a shadow. It disrupts the geometry and adds a touch of the unexpected. It makes the composition feel playful. Painting is always a conversation, and here Dobrian is in dialogue with the history of art. He shows us that painting is an embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, inviting multiple interpretations.