A limited selection from the artistic production of painter Nicole Jutka presents works created mainly during the previous two years. Her paintings convey two key themes that define her artistic concerns. The selected collection includes specifically conceived landscape paintings as well as a series of portraits of young people, the artist’s prevailing theme.

Nicole Jutka presents her work and creative concept under the title Light Penetrates Darkness. The title indicates a symbolic perception of a fundamental aspect of the artist’s practice. Jutka creates a varicoloured and lively perspective on society, characterised primarily by colouristically and expressively conceived portraits.

The artist comes from Romania but lives and works in Germany. When she moved to Germany, she experienced a change of cultural identity and a transition into a new cultural environment. Her work conveys the process of reconciling her values with new cultural challenges and different experiences. Her new life situation generates an impulse for focused observation and the depiction of this sensitive aspect of her life, which has, to a great extent, become a premise for defining the scope of her artistic interests: an intense exploration of her environment and its cultural modifications and differences.

She strives to find possibilities for identification and integration in diverse situations. She acknowledges that there is no single unifying cultural model; thus, she is sensitive and responsive to the perception and manifestation of different cultural contexts. First of all, she looks for common, essential human values and for an identifying inner spiritual light in the human being.

The change of environment and the fundamental transformation of the cultural context represent a substantial moment in the search for identity and integrating factors within an ambiguous existence. She assumes that there is one aspect that transcends various cultural and ethnic differences: a common human approach represented by each individual’s search for personal responsibility within the interconnected world in which we live.

Nicole Jutka’s project is mainly about the search for light in the human being. The radiance of an inner world and the observation of the world’s diversity through a colouristically accented image of the human figure give us an indication of her understanding and perception of a multifaceted social environment and different cultural contexts.

“And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The exhibition Light Penetrates Darkness, opened by Nicoleta Jutka at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant on 19 November 2015, was a small celebration for those of us who had the opportunity to see it.

I was impressed by the force of colour present throughout Nicoleta’s works, which, in a certain way, seemed dedicated both to the contrast between the cultural worlds of Romania and Germany—the two countries between which the artist moves—and to the continuous process of convergence that the European continent has experienced since the European Union chose to expand, on several occasions, over the past three decades.

I would not say that the light descending from the artist’s canvases was biblical in nature; this is not why I chose the celebrated quotation from the Gospel of John as a motto. The light that radiates from every angle of Nicoleta Jutka’s imagination is connected to life itself: the life that breaks through the layers of the earth and bursts forth beneath the powerful, life-giving sun. It is a light that combines the force of the seed, enveloped in the mystery of birth, with the dazzling rays descending from the sky.

What could be more invigorating than life itself? The vivid, powerful colours, radiating an energy in harmony with the painter’s own being, provoke an equally powerful response in the viewer’s retina and imagination.

Paradoxically, the dazzling light of which I have spoken causes neither pain nor wounds. On the contrary, it is a healing, optimistic and vital light. The exhibition as a whole becomes a hymn to life, to the joy of living, and to the desire to share that joy with others.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, moving image, performance, and participatory formats, the practice examines visibility as an unstable condition shaped by light, memory, migration, and the social and political structures through which images are read. The image is treated not as a fixed surface, but as a field of transformation — contingent upon light, the position of the body, and the limits of recognition.

Since 2013, LIGHT PENETRATES DARKNESS has provided the conceptual framework for this ongoing research. Fluorescent pigments and ultraviolet light activate successive states within the same work. Neither state is presented as the definitive truth of the other. Light operates not as an effect, but as a material that reveals, conceals, and destabilizes what initially appeared stable. Over time, this inquiry has moved beyond the painted surface into film, projection, sound, architecture, and public space.

Identity, migration, memory, femininity, motherhood, conflict, and peace recur throughout the work. In THE JOURNEY OF THE ANT and NEW PEOPLE, identity emerges through adaptation, superimposition, and the continuous negotiation of belonging. HANGING GARDENS situates the garden as a mental architecture of freedom, fragility, and regeneration, while LA VIE EN ROSE shifts the codes associated with femininity from the decorative toward a language of resistance and self-definition.

In PRAY LOVE PEACE and THE SILENT VOICE, peace is approached not as an idealized image, but as a public responsibility. The intimate and the political are held in tension through relationships between vulnerability and resistance, voice and silence. A personal history shaped by migration and by life between Romania and Germany informs these concerns without confining the work to autobiography.

In projects such as TRANS SILVA / SILVA MEMORIA, the research assumes an architectural scale. The monument becomes a portal, reflection incorporates the body and the landscape, and passage itself produces meaning. Participatory practice extends this spatial and ethical inquiry. Rather than functioning as a pedagogical supplement, participation becomes an artistic form through which the authority of the image is redistributed and the viewer enters the production of meaning.

The work does not position light and darkness as mutually exclusive terms, nor does it attempt to resolve their tension. It remains within the active space between them — a site where perception shifts, identity remains open, and art can operate as a form of memory, resistance, and public responsibility.

Nicole Jutka