At the heart of Farcas’ practice is portraiture. Portraits of women,
men and children, real and fictionalised, parade across her boards and
canvases. Ranging in size from the diminutive world of the miniature,
to large scale crowd scenes, Farcas’s work delivers a colourful
ensemble of characters. Sometimes Farcas tends towards the
fantastical, combining animals or anthropomorphic beings with her
fully human figures; drawing from mythology and fairy tales, often
sourced from her native Romanian heritage. Always though, it is
possible to find Farcas herself in the work:
This world of Farcas’s could be described as being between the visible
and invisible. What she feels and ’sees’ in her mind’s eye is combined
by seen and felt experiences in reality and who is to say that one is
less real than the other when both can be translated into memories,
and after both are re-born and co-existent within the grounds of her
paintings?
Farcas’s paintings certainly have a dream-like quality about them. But
in amidst the soft, misty environs she creates, there is a tangible
physicality. The figures are robust, passionate creatures awash with
emotions and often depicted mid action. The notion of observing a
figure who is seemingly unaware, lends a voyeuristic quality to the
work.
Merleau-Ponty argued that the artist’s ability to see the world is
impossible to separate from his ability to move through it. From this
point it is possible to go on to therefore claim that painting is as
much a felt experience as a visual one. The artist needs to feel
herself in her paintings, and to make it possible for others to also
find themselves in the work. Farcas knows this, which is what makes
her paintings so arresting and seductive.
From “Oana Farcas: Between the Visible and the Invisible by Jane Neal”