CLUJ afterSCHOOL: On the Curator–Artist Dichotomy
Xenia Tinca: Maria Stoica – A World Slightly Elsewhere
December 11, 2025 - January 30, 2026
Opening: Thursday, December 11, 7pm
There are worlds that do not reveal themselves through abrupt assertion but through a gradual gliding, through a subtle shift in the perception (or definition) of reality. These are worlds—visual, emotional, and dreamlike at the same time—that do not impose themselves, but insinuate themselves into the fabric of the real; they do not overwhelm like eruptions, but rather envelop like emanations of a vibrant and delicate creative imagination. They are worlds constructed as though they were an echo of a parallel dimension, adjacent to the realm of the visible commonplace, and yet radically distinct from it. Maria Stoica is an artist who builds her pictorial universe in such imaginative crevices and topological interstices: a visual world inhabited by seemingly familiar objects that nonetheless lose their usual, gravitational docility and yield to deconstruction and reconstruction under the diffuse action of the imaginative force field, in ways reminiscent of the entities that populate the light of a dream just beginning. The exhibition A World Slightly Elsewhere proposes a dynamic incursion into this elegantly original, poetic territory, delicate and somewhat bizarre, yet relatable for the one who commits to exploration. In Maria Stoica’s world, objects keep their shape but change their logic, spaces remain recognizable, but are traversed by a captivating light—implausible, yet convincing; reality seems to reflect upon itself, only to reorder itself anew.
Maria Stoica’s artistic process is fundamentally shaped by a sustained tension between recognition and wonder, between the familiar and visual exotism, between description and vivification. Everyday objects—a chair, a cup, the corner of a table, a window shutter, the interior of a room—are displaced from their usual, habitual inertia and endowed with a strange vibration: this is not about generating a melancholic atmosphere, but rather about a peaceful yet decisive transfer of perception and emotional temperature from the register of the descriptive to that of the dreamlike. The banal thus becomes animated, reinvigorated and reinvigorating, restless and vaguely unsettling; the works are not governed by anxiety or permeated by ghosts, but are animated by a certain tremor, while, from behind a line, a volute, or a distorted corner, you might expect one of Cortázar’s cronopios to appear.
Color plays an essential role in this process. For the artist, color is not merely a tool of representation: its simultaneously energetic and delicate manipulation is a form of thought and emotional expression. Painterly pigment operates not so much descriptively as affectively; it does not merely outline forms, but generates states. The hues are chosen with an intuitive sensitivity that depends more on visceral perception than on the requirements of a rational, impersonal chromatics. Maria Stoica uses color as an organizing principle that nonetheless allows itself sensuous, playful liberties.
The works in A World Slightly Elsewhere are the outcome of recent explorations into the expressive potential of watercolor and oil pastel on paper, whose inherent and rather charming fragility augments the dynamic immediacy of the pieces. The encounter of these two registers of materiality—watercolor and pastel—one ethereal, the other velvety and unctuous, delineates the framework of a dialogue between the subtleties of evanescence and textural richness. The large-scale works are suspended, detached from the convention of the frame, offering themselves as vulnerable and imposing at the same time. They function as double gates—indeed, portals—granting access to a space-time of imagination, to a “land of mirrors” where everything resembles the known world but is governed by different rules, invented by an Alice who does not flee from reality but reconfigures it, exploring its folds and hidden possibilities.
Overall, Maria Stoica’s art—particularly as showcased in A World Slightly Elsewhere—reveals itself as an emergent expression of a tension, firmly embraced and delicately mastered by the artist, between structure and flux, as the emanation of the tectonics of a liminal space located on the sometimes imprecise frontier between the visible and the imaginary. Her painting is, more than anything, an art of perpetually incomplete metamorphosis and, by virtue of this very quality, all the more fascinating, visually magnetic, and paradoxically liberating.
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Maria Stoica (b. 1998 in Arad; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca) is a young, relevant voice within the Romanian contemporary art landscape. A graduate of the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca (Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees), she is currently continuing her doctoral research within the same institution. She won First Prize at the 11th edition of Expo Maraton (UAD Cluj-Napoca, 2023) with her exhibition Nelucruri, presented at Casa Matei Gallery. Her portfolio includes exhibitions in galleries and museums such as Jecza Gallery and Himera in Timișoara (The Past is a Very Insistent Voice, 2025, group exhibition), the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca (Crossroads, 2023, group exhibition), and the Art Museum of Arad (Nested Dreams, 2024, solo exhibition).
Xenia Tinca is an art historian and curator, and a PhD candidate at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. Combining theoretical research with project management, she coordinated the La Cave exhibition program of the French Institute in Cluj-Napoca during 2023–2024 and worked as a project manager at Quadro Gallery, contributing to the development and implementation of coherent cultural programs. In recent years, she has strengthened her practice through a multifaceted curatorial portfolio that includes projects such as Crossroads (Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca, 2023), Póros (Diana Popuț, La Cave, 2023), and All Is Gone And It All Lingers (Oana Cervinschi & Ingrid Dan, Biju Gallery, within Praxis!, 2025). Her curatorial activity is complemented by her journalistic experience: between 2021 and 2024, she collaborated with the publication ArtSens (Timișoara), for which she wrote articles, reviews, and interviews.
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SABOT’s CLUJ afterSCHOOL program, initiated in 2017, is dedicated to supporting artists and curators who have recently completed their studies at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca or are currently engaged in postgraduate research. Conceived as a platform for transition and mentorship, the program offers young practitioners the opportunity to test ideas and to develop curatorial skills. This exhibition, in particular, grew out of an inspiring conversation with professor, art historian, and critic Bogdan Iacob, who emphasized the need for dedicated “exhibition making” training for the new generation of art practitioners, an idea that directly shaped both the project’s structure and its guiding intention.
