Peculiarities of plastic image creation in Maria Coțofan’s tapestry

Abstract

The creation of the painter Maria Coțofan inscribes in the history of decorative arts of the Republic Moldova an original page in which, significant motifs of everyday reality and important iconographic landmarks, typical of popular plastic creation, blend artistically and harmoniously. It contributes to the conception of works where tradition and contemporaneity work aesthetically together. In some works, the traditional motifs of the popular carpet, such as those of anthropomorphic, aviomorphic, arboreal, phytomorphic and geometric origin, being judiciously revalued, endow the image with distinguished aesthetic expressions and valuable messages. In others, the memorable iconographic landmarks of Orthodox Christian and historical defense architecture serve as a starting point in the composition of images and highlight artistically the non-transient essences and local cultural values. In the protagonist’s works, the morphological and syntactic repertoire of plastic realization of image completes a wide range of means and processes, which originate both in the secular tradition of technological weaving of folk carpets, as well as in the various plastic paradigms, whose conceptual and aesthetic coordinates are rooted in the stylistics of European avant-garde movements and in the unique local stylistic strands of tapestry art from the second half of the twentieth century.