A clock face floats at eye height in a room otherwise furnished with absolute domestic normality — the walls, the floor, the window and its curtain are all rendered with realist fidelity. Only the clock is wrong: untethered, casting a shadow that falls in the wrong direction, showing a time that does not correspond to the light in the room.
The rendering of the clock itself took the longest — it had to be painted with the same care as the surrounding room so that the impossibility of its position would carry weight rather than seem like a trick.
About the artist
Ioana Barbu's paintings combine the precision of realist technique with subjects and situations that cannot exist — architecture that opens onto impossible spaces, figures that cast the wrong shadows, rooms that contain more than their dimensions allow. She builds this pictorial logic carefully and with deliberate slowness, which is partly why the impossible elements feel grounded rather than theatrical.
She studied at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and has been working in surrealist modes for over a decade, developing a visual language that is entirely her own. She accepts commissions from collectors comfortable with giving her significant creative freedom.
