Two hands, speckled with autumn leaves, lay on each side of a large sheet of white paper. In her left hand, between her knotted fingers, Greta holds a large black marker. With confidence, determination, she stamps the sheet of paper and begins to draw sharp, definitive shapes.
So was my introduction to the practice of Greta Bratescu in a video exhibited at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which recorded the act of drawing by the Romanian artist.
The exhibition, entitled The Power of the Line, surveys the work of Bratescu over the last decade and focuses on the line as a structuring principle. In her hands, drawing appears as a performance, as the spatial trace of a movement that happened in the making of a work of art. To me, the precept of the work lies, among other things, in the will to capture the energy, the mood with which a posture or a gesture is executed.
The artist states that she doesn’t know where the line will lead her, but as I look at her compositions, I understand that it is fully intended. She incorporates serendipity into the work like a dance a partner with whom she collaborates in order to achieve a more dynamic, more engaging, occupation of space.
What strikes me with Greta Bratescu, is her effortless ability to succinctly bridges the gulf between drawing and dance, between topology and picture. As she beautifully puts it, in the interview on display in the gallery, drawing is like singing. Here with one verb, Greta summerises what she hits with one line, i.e. the depicting of a highly constructed, cultural and yet, at the same time primal, existential gesture.
