Renascence of Imaginalia by Andrada Lolu | until September 24th
06/08/2025
No beginning. No closure.
Just signs, suspended.
Imaginalia is what you almost remember.
What stays after the image fades.
Not fiction – but something just as fragile.
In Renascence of Imaginalia, Andrada Lolu creates an inner territory shaped by visual memory, symbolic fragments, and a lucid trust in the imaginary. The works are suspended between the recognisable and the cryptic.
The series begins in dialogue with the writings of C.S. Lewis, particularly his reflections on imagination as a mechanism of knowledge and emotional memory. Narnia is not just a literary reference, but a conceptual backdrop for an artistic practice oriented toward what cannot be fully defined: an image that exists at the threshold between certainty and forgetting.
Andrada’s works avoid explicit narrative. Some appear as delicate presences – in graphite or technical mixtures that do not seek visual spectacle – while others feel notated, recorded, preserved. The titles read like fragments of conversations. The texts do not illustrate, explain, or translate. What holds them together is a fidelity to a mode of perception that precedes meaning – a kind of faith in the visual before it becomes an idea.
Renascence of Imaginalia does not aim for thematic coherence or discursive clarity. What remains is what persists after the story has been forgotten: fragments, questions, references revisited with a renewed gaze. Imaginalia is not a place, but a closeness to a lost state – an interior time in which imagination is not escape, but a form of knowledge.
This selection is part of a larger concept: On Vigil in Imaginalia. For this exhibition, Andrada Lolu chose to return to these works with a new perspective – free, objective, and with the courage to dream beyond this world.
About Andrada Lolu:
Andrada Lolu is a Romanian artist whose works are profound and deep, with dazzling darkness. Faith, beauty, longing and belonging, love and suffering, childhood and existential anguish are abiding concerns of her works. She uses subtle monochromatic colors, infused with passages of muted or radiant colors or lines that cut through the paintings like cracks or wounds – reminders of inner battles and spaces for finding the light and love of the Creator.
Andrada is brilliant in is her keen understanding of composition, and curious and creative at the same time. Her works are rich with symbolism and allegory: she is using different visual elements to represent deeper themes such as the struggle between good and evil, love, sadness, pain and joy. Each painting is a vignette of multi-layered textures, shapes, and meanings against an omnipresent black, grey or white background where other forms fade into and emerge from.
These forms and images are (sur)real and unexplainable, reductive, quiet, almost gothic, characterized by dramatic and intense emotions expressed by the use of techniques like chiaroscuro. Andrada is oen exploring the sublime, where beauty, awe and fear coexist. Situated in vast landscapes and emphasizes the power and majesty of God, her paintings reflect the interconnectedness of faith and hope.
Her works were exhibited in Romania, Croatia and Italy. – Julijana Mladenovska-Tešija, MTh/drs
Curated by Lorelai Mursa & Crina Ciocian, this exhibition is open for visitation from August 7th to September 24th at Meron Horea, No. 5.