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Street Art in Craiova
By Chiara
I remember very well the first day I spent in Craiova.
Everything was unfamiliar to me.
Scaring, even.
I spent hours looking outside, from the window of my room, at the huge, white building of the University, full of windows, too, from which I tried to figure out the activities that where having place there.
Just under me, one of the main streets, bathed in the ray of the midday sun, full of people coming and going, waiting at the bus stop or going to have lunch in the restaurants and shops nearby, going to lesson or to work, mothers with children and old men with a calm pace and girls with books under their arms.
When I finally decided that it was pointless to stay at home all day long, I found myself in that environment, feeling like a sub who dives for the first time in a new sea.
Lost in my bubble, I swam through this algae and jellyfishes, hearing sounds I wasn’t able to understand, as if they came from the mouths of fishes, the mysterious songs of whales and the high-pitched melody of dolphins, while behind every corner and every face I feared to find a shark.
I decided to go straight, and almost without knowing it I arrived in the city centre.
The first thing I noticed weren’t the cozy places and nice shops, nor the peculiar architecture, but them.
The impressing murals painted on the walls and on electronic controllers.
I was particularly surprised by their quantity and concentration, since I didn’t expected to find street art so developed in Craiova.
Walking through the city centre, the first thing you will notice arriving in the main square is the huge mural painting that covers completely the front of a building.
With the use of the trompe d’oeil so loved by baroque artists, this painting ‘breaks’ the wall and project us in a surreal street full of mysterious characters from another time. Actually, timeless.
It is a fictional world , inhabited by delicate and fairy-like girls with old fashion clothes, beautiful and mysterious, surrounded by arabesque like flowers and colorful birds.
You can see them in every corner, even the most unexpected.
Going a bit further, we find the Wall of Europe, decorated with allegories of several European Countries, from France to Poland to Hungary.
This huge work of urban requalification was made possible thanks to the talent and creativity of the students of the local art high school ‘Marin Sorescu’, together with the street artist Andrei Tonita, former student of the same high school, coming from the section of Religious Art, and his colleagues Raul Moşulescu, Daiana Bianca Stancu, Maria Oprița and Alina Leoveanu.
Tonita is also the main author of the Europe Wall, together with his colleague Ionut Giurca.
Is also importat to take into consideration the effort of the municipality, who in 2015 created an open call for artists to decorate the city, offering funds and prizes.
But is not just that.
If we walk past the centre and allow ourself to get lost through less crowded streets, our surprised eyes could meet the works of other local street artists.
An example is the huge mural that is placed near the station.
It takes two sections of the same building, and it depicts, in allegorical and almost ironical hues, the battle of Rovine, between the former Ottoman Empire and the army of Mircea the Elder, an artwork born from the hand of the street artist Irlo.
The figure of the sultan, represented like a sort of genie, painted in pink ,green and other lively and surreal colors, , creates a striking contrast with the one, white and calm, of Mircea, who has one of his hands on his chest, over a golden circle that recalls a halo, a sort of holiness underlined also by the purple triangle behind his head, symbol of God (he’s the good guy, definitely).
History and present, ancient and contemporary melts in the colorful and distorted vision of a person under LSD, in a whirl where is impossible to find out what is real and what is not.
The same atmosphere of surrealism is present in the paintings of other street artists, such as Kero, Krom, and Obie Platon.
In their works, Romanian history and traditions are mixed with modernity and it’s icons, the monsters of a personal mythology live together with the demons of the collectivity, in a world so impossible but at the same time so familiar that it touches some deep chord even in the soul of a foreigner, as if the symbols underlying the Romanian society were, after all, linked to the same archetypes we all share.
So, the wolf of Kero and Krom, the huge monster present in at least two of Craiova’s murals, recalls somehow the symbol of my beloved Rome.
Last but not the least, there are also a lot of street artist closer to the Graffiti style and methods, such as Cainele cu Lipici, whose dogs are practically everywhere in Craiova.
Personally, since I’m a person with zero sense of direction, I always use them to find my way around in the city.
I could say that are my seeing-eye dogs.
Craiova aimed to be one of the Capitals of Culture in 2021, and decided to do it promoting culture in a very special way, choosing a form of art which, even if often considered inferior to the academic art, has the great strength of being able to speak directly to the spectators, in a sort of open museum, free from fees so everyone can ‘enter’ and enjoy.
And, I suppose, this is one of the things that made me fell in love with this city.
