Gentle is the Night, Soul is the Garden

„The exhibited works, featuring smaller colored graphics on wooden panels and large oil-painted canvases, are thematically woven around certain personal preoccupations of the artist, offering a glimpse into her inner world: the garden, an intimate, familiar setting that includes portraits, small zoological compositions, and nocturnal landscapes. Each series highlights details that evoke meditation and introspection, with subjects that Diana Oțet selects for her artistic practice embodying timeless, seemingly unremarkable encounters: the quiet of night, the tranquility of kindness, interior landscapes of the home, nature’s scenes and details, and elements reimagined from the animal world. While timeless, these elements find grounding in our present reality, discernible through aspects like attire, hair, and the physical characteristics of the figures, as well as through the formal and chromatic approach.

Diana Oțet stages poetic-narrative spaces, true visual poems, reflecting on the intimate and personal aspects of daily life. Her tender representations, brought to life through simple and clear brushstrokes, capture the immediacy of her close world, which she experiences with peace and calm, all measured by the embrace of her young son.

There’s something within these images that transcends the represented subjects, something “deeper than ourselves,” as the Blessed Augustine once said. Like still waters, undisturbed, Diana Oțet’s paintings mirror both metaphysical and seemingly trivial events, bringing together (in real flesh) women of Christian tradition and endowing them with an atemporal quality that sheds mysticism and dons a mantle of the contemporary world. It’s as if she reinterprets biblical scenes, akin to the approach of Pontormo or Bill Viola in his video work The Greeting, inspired by the Mannerist painter, blending timelessness and modernity. In her painting Wonder Garden, for example, the Virgin Mary with child meets Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist and her cousin, in a scene filled with meaning. In a quiet depiction of hands washed in a modern glass sink, we recognize the act as Pontius Pilate’s “washing of responsibility”—a refusal to bear the burden of guilt. Elsewhere, a child, who we understand is the artist’s son, chases doves, both of the Holy Spirit and our mundane reality, in a paradoxical scene of Memento Mori, marked by a skull misplaced in the Garden of Eden—or perhaps at the edge of a nearby forest? These nocturnal, intimate paintings are small iconographies of maternity and the angels of the Lord descending into the backyard garden or, perhaps, the meadow of goodness’s lamb.

The lingering question remains: are Diana Oțet’s gardens configurations of the soul, or are they biblical scenes?”
Curator Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu