"The dreams noted by the artist Daniela Zbarcea in a diary completed over the last few years are the subject of a psychobiographical essay in several sequences, and among them, their graphic imprint on the pages of a fragmented workbook or on the "blank page" of her own bed sheet is only one episode. While being in its turn a zero degree of figuration and drawing, writing as a bodily act performs in the artist's project a personal pictographic language, combining letters, images, signs and forms – often unintelligible in the absence of mediation through the rereading and translation offered by the author.
Sleep and dreaming can be a subversive critique and an affront to the "diurnal" order of reality that we consciously share with others. Art history has cultivated them a lot for these virtues, and Daniela Zbarcea has just completed an extensive academic research on the autobiographies and diaries of artists over time, in which the telling of dreams is frequently a form of self-portraiture. Comprising examples of her own dreams, i.e. samples of a psychic manifestation free from the current constraints of the conscious world (and therefore problematic, even possibly scandalous and rebellious from the perspective of "waking" reality), Daniela Zbarcea's personal archive of dreams paints a dreamscape with texts and drawings, which serve systematic introspections and voluntary self-observations, followed with obstinacy and perseverance. In the process of its making, the artist successively plays the roles of author/producer of dreams, voyeur and observer of her own sleep, and then secretary and narrator of them by capturing, fixing and processing them in visual narratives.
The props of the process (the bed, the room, the artist's intimate area, the space and her work objects, the studio, the house) tactfully and discreetly disappear into a surrounding background that accommodates strange dreamlike stories. And the same scenery of the inner mental world lived as a Wunderkammer extends the time frame as well (sleep and dreams as time givers), to include a controversial, liminal experience, which the artist embraces and even claims to practice with a similar discipline and dedication: lucid dreams." - Adriana Oprea
Daniela Zbarcea has been a doctor of visual arts since 2022. Visual artist, curator and manager of cultural projects, she has a double training in visual arts and painting restoration. Daniela Zbarcea has a long experience of working within the professional Romanian art world, in which she has activated for almost 15 years not only as a visual artist, but also as an art managerand expert evaluator for numerous Romanian contemporary art projects and exhibitions. If at the beginning of her career the artist focused on the study of painting and photography, in recent years she has expanded her area of interest through multidisciplinary activities, oriented towards performative, post-media practices, closely combined with a sustained approach of art research and documentation.
Author of several essays and articles on Romanian contemporary art, Adriana Oprea has been collaborating for more than 20 years with Romanian and international artists, publications and art institutions. Trained in art history, Adriana is a curator and art critic, a collaborator of Arta magazine since the new series in 2010 and a museographer at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest since 2006. At MNAC she coordinated the production of solo and collective exhibitions organized between 2014 and 2017, while dealing until now with the museum's documentary archive dedicated to contemporary art. Member of the International Association of Art Critics since 2013, she is currently curating mainly projects signed by female contemporary artists.