Gallery13

The Sacred as Memory of the Human Face
Victoria Țăroi – Decebal Țăroi
Gorj County Museum “Alexandru Ștefulescu”, Târgu Jiu
Within the spaces of the Gorj County Museum “Alexandru Ștefulescu” in Târgu Jiu, the exhibition “Visual Sacralities” proposes a carefully articulated artistic dialogue between the paintings of Victoria Țăroi and the sculptures of Decebal Țăroi, shaped with both lucidity and sensitivity.
The exhibition establishes, from the very beginning, an atmosphere of silence and introspection. The sobriety of the museum space and the carefully measured rhythm of the display allow the works to breathe and to construct a coherent visual journey in which painting and sculpture complement one another without entering into visual competition. Everything is organized according to a logic of balance and dialogue.
Victoria Țăroi’s painting develops a universe of sacred femininity situated at the border between icon, memory, and symbol. The frontal, almost hieratic faces preserve the calmness of ritual representation; yet beyond this apparent serenity, one senses a deeply human tension. Each figure seems extracted from a collective memory, carrying within itself fragments of sacred architecture, traditional decorative motifs, and traces of a discreet spirituality.
The dominant blue within the compositions functions not merely as a chromatic choice, but as an opening toward meditation, creating the impression of an image suspended between appearance and disappearance. Delicate drawing, transparent overlays, and graphic interventions transform the pictorial surface into a space where memory slowly settles and accumulates. At times, the female figure merges with the structure of a church; elsewhere, the halo becomes a geometric, almost architectural element. Here, the sacred is filtered through a contemporary sensibility, free from theatricality and symbolic excess.
In counterpoint, Decebal Țăroi’s sculpture introduces raw matter and the archetypal expression of form. His works resemble relics recovered from an imaginary civilization or fragments of ancestral memory. Fragmented heads, masks, vertical structures, and totemic objects convey a grave, almost ritual force. The artist deliberately preserves fissures, cracks, and traces of modeling, embracing the fragility of matter as an essential component of visual expression.
Particularly striking are the sculptures in which the human face becomes a modular structure or a collective sign. The multiplication of gazes, the fragmentation of anatomy, and the geometrization of volumes create the sensation of an identity permanently suspended between construction and ruin. In other works, matter seems to retain the energy of the initial gesture, as though the objects were not definitively completed, but captured within an ongoing process of transformation.
The dialogue between the two artists is constructed precisely through this complementarity. While Victoria Țăroi’s painting proposes a spiritualization of the image and a poetics of interiority, Decebal Țăroi’s sculpture introduces the concrete dimension of material memory, trace, and relic. In both artistic directions, however, the human figure remains the central axis of reflection. The face becomes a symbolic space, a site of memory, and the bearer of a tension between the sacred and the fragility of existence.
“Visual Sacralities” deliberately avoids spectacular effects, favoring instead symbolic density and visual meditation. It is precisely this restraint that grants the exhibition its authenticity and strength. This is not an exhibition that explains the sacred, but one that suggests it through atmosphere, matter, and silence.
Through the coherence of its artistic discourse and the maturity of its visual language, the project realized by Victoria Țăroi and Decebal Țăroi confirms an important direction within contemporary Romanian art: the recovery of the spiritual dimension of the image without rhetoric or gratuitous ornamentation. Within the space of the Gorj County Museum “Alexandru Ștefulescu”, this encounter between painting and sculpture becomes a coherent discourse on memory, fragility, and the persistence of the sacred within contemporary sensibility.