Jecza Gallery Timișoara presents a solo exhibition by Ecaterina Vrana, curated by Erwin Kessler, opening on 16 October 2026 at 6 pm. In the curatorial text below, Kessler reflects on the encounters between painting, dreams and music that shaped Vrana’s artistic universe.
Curatorial text by Erwin Kessler
Ornella Vanoni meant nothing to me. I had never heard of her during the years, decades, in fact, when Ecaterina would summon me to her studio at short notice to see the latest painting she had made. It was a ritual, cemented over time, in which we unravelled the painting, its subject, its story, but above all its forms and colours. Ecaterina quite literally dreamed her paintings: they “appeared to her”. She would then draw them, marking each area with the colours from her dream, before calculating, very practically, the quantities required in tubes of paint. Once the drawing had been loaded with the prescribed type and amount of colour, the painting was declared finished and ready to receive a title with which to enter the world. Ecaterina thus released herself from the burden of anxiety brought on by the pleasure of painting a canvas and the fear that the painting might fail.
On entering her studio, I would often hear Italian popular songs from the 1970s or Romanian songs from the interwar period, Jean Moscopol, Cristian Vasile, alongside light pop from the 1980s, Anda Călugăreanu or Angela Similea. More gravely, at times Luz Casal’s Piensa en mí would ring out, from High Heels, the film by Ecaterina’s favourite director, Pedro Almodóvar.
Most artists listen to music or keep the radio on while they work, or, as we now say, labour. (The idea, anti-Romantic in origin, that art and creation must be defined or understood as labour represents great progress towards reducing them to a community service like any other, with a pension waiting at the end. An idea entirely foreign to Ecaterina, whose aversion to paperwork was so strong that she needed twenty years to summon the courage to collect her graduation diploma.)
I did not visit many studios, but I was accustomed to hearing the sound of each artist at work. Usually, it was a neutral sound, a background that did not engage me in any way. In Ecaterina’s studio, the sound was strikingly present and repellent. The music was a sentimental bazaar, a form of torture. Nothing in music felt more alien to me than the melodramatic clichés dripping like artificial honey from all those languorous, hysterical voices, issuing from a world of feelings inflated with pathos like plastic balloons.
Over time, I came to understand that Ecaterina needed this sonic world, in which there was a single watchword, whispered or declaimed: love. It allowed her to delineate more sharply her own world of despair, from which a single watchword erupted: death. In her imagination, Ecaterina inhabited a universe of life-affirming feelings, expressed flatly and wanly in music, so that she could project onto canvas the universe of her morbid visions, electrically coloured, more intense than life.
Through coincidentia oppositorum, life in Ecaterina’s work had the sound of death, and death had the face of life. It is hardly surprising that her most powerful works feed on this collision between the inner world, her own dreams, and the outer world, the music of others. Her characters, in couples or groups, meet before our eyes and exchange gestures of intimacy that drive them apart, or resort to acts of withdrawal that bring them closer. The encounter is the moment, or the scene, that brings the painting to life.
Although Ecaterina’s painting is not musical in the sense that musicality in painting is usually associated with warm pastel palettes evoking Mozartian moods and feelings, her canvases carry a heavy charge of direct emotion. This has an affinity with at least some of her favourite songs, including Ornella Vanoni’s L’appuntamento, featured in the video Ecaterina made that is included in the exhibition: “Non m’importa cosa il mondo può pensare, io non me ne voglio andare.”
Ecaterina spoke no foreign languages, and it is unlikely that these lyrics, “I don’t care what the world may think; I don’t want to leave”, reached her ears as such. Yet the persistence with which she painted crucial and fatal encounters throughout her life, and above all the fact that they gave rise to paintings that refuse to leave our sight, suggests that, somewhere, an underlying musical and emotional affinity connects her to at least one name that now means something to me: Ornella Vanoni.
Erwin Kessler
The exhibition is open to visitors from October to December 2026.
The event is part of the project Parcul Fundației Jecza – scenă deschisă (Jecza Foundation Sculpture Park – Open Stage), running from June to October 2026 and funded by the Municipality of Timișoara through its Centre for Projects.
With the support of Profi Romania and the Bosch Romania Foundation.