There is a word in Romanian that does not translate. Dor. Something between longing and ache, a reaching toward something that cannot quite be named. Not grief. Not nostalgia. Closer to the feeling of standing at a window at dusk and not being sure what you're looking for.

Emma Pavaloaia's exhibition Just Out of Reach at IOMO Gallery in Bucharest begins at the dinner table. In an ordinary evening, reality starts to be invaded by her imagination. What pours in is everything. Poverty, war, greed, angels, devils, the post-communist apartment blocks of her childhood neighbourhood and the particular anxiety of living just twenty minutes' walk from a NATO air base. The paintings that follow are not in any way political. They are simply the contents of one woman's mind on a quiet evening, allowed to take form. The fact that they may seem political, tells you everything you need to know.

Pavaloaia uses the ordinary. Be it a living room, a flower vase, a diamond (or is it a meal?) as a threshold between the mundane and the metaphysical. She reflects fondly of her old neighbourhood, "Blocuri," through a funerary statue. Nature arrives to move it somewhere safer. A guardian angel has been locked away in a box for safekeeping. Just present enough but equally inaccessible. A diamond sits on a plate. The Last Meal, as she puts it. The final course of a civilisation that chose material wealth over spiritual sustenance.

The devil appears more than once in this exhibition. Not as a threat, but as a mere conversationalist. In one work, Pavaloaia toasts a glass with him. He fills hers with tar and flames from hell. She fills his with holy water and basil. This is the Romanian folk tradition at its most alive. Not the suppression of evil, but the negotiation with it. A călca dracul pe coadă, or in English, to step on the devil's tail, is as much a warning as it is an admission.

Threaded through it all is the question of art itself. Pavaloaia painted one work while reading de Chirico's memoirs, imagining a postcard sent to him across a century that spoke of how people still come to exhibitions searching for meaning, still seeking a transcendence that remains just out of reach. It is the most honest thing an artist can say. And in a country still negotiating the distance between what was promised and what arrived, it is also the most Romanian.

— Thom Oosterhof

Emma Păvăloaia: Just Out of Reach