Aurel Bulacu - Chimera

Aurel Bulacu’s Chimeras

No. 11 / September 2019

  Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published on Observator Cultural magazine, no.637/16th of August 2012

 

Between 27th of July and 7th of September 2012, the Cultural Center “Palatele Brâncoveneşti” Mogoşoaia hosts a new exceptional art show: “Aurel Bulacu’s Graphics”. The art catalog released on this occasion offers the best version of this double event, exhibition and editorial. 

In order to avoid any kind of redundancy, I invite the reader to see the exhibition or to buy the album, and I limit myself to analyze the imaginary in Aurel Bulacu’s creation.

 

Aurel Bulacu - Chimera
Aurel Bulacu – Chimera

According to the mythology of ancient Greece, the chimera is a fabulous animal improbably made up of plausible parts from many animals. Artistic representations of chimeras are a constant to this day. The artistic or commercial stake, however, is different, from creator to creator. The iconographic source can be a pretext for drawing or color, or it can play the main role, in a semiological context. 

Formally, the subject also invites to political and social criticism. Through his mixed media work, Rashid Rana touches, for example, on the subject of sexuality and even pornography, inscribed in militant coordinates. Combining elements of traditional and modern art, Hamra Abbas’s chimeras constitute dual critiques of modern Islamic and Western cultures.

As for Bulacu, the chimeras represent, I think, the materialization of controlled immersions into imaginary. Retaining all attributes corresponding to the artist, like a shaman, the creator transcends the limits of reality to discover lines, shapes, volumes, color matching and many other morphological elements, which he brings to “our world” in order to show to others rather than to exhibit it. Thus, we do not think that the possible psychoanalytic interpretations could make any sense, given that the whole process of laying the images on a surface is an artistically controlled one.

Contemporary artists such as Rodel Tapaya develop in both original and coherent systems aspects of various mythologies, which intertwine with their own imaginary. The human-animal metamorphoses of the artist Lela Shields bring into question the realms and barriers, seen as transcendent limits. Flesh, skeleton and sexuality (non – androgyny) represent, as in Aurel Bulacu artworks, logical consequences of the intersection between species, entities, eons. Chimeras demand their right to reproduction, they want bodies, they try to access the real world that created them. It can be about the collective subconscious, whose echoes are felt even in art.

 

Aurel Bulacu - Chimera
Aurel Bulacu – Chimera

Returning to the exhibition and the artist I am referring to, the relationship between chimera, body and woman, via sexuality, is ambivalent. The artist sometimes gives up the fantastic, to the detriment of fantasy. Pygmalion-like reflexes announce their existence in a number of artworks from which the fantastic has been eluded. Elements of some decadent scenography are subtly drawn by minimal interventions, with a compositional role. Of note is the artist’s total detachment from his subjects, as well as his total attachment to the proposed shapes. Bulacu is unique, a quality as rare as it is appreciated. What matters in his artwork is the graphic sign, the balance and the space. His artworks are not windows to imaginary, but rather mediated representations of it.

I would add that imagination and imaginary do not always overlap. In Aurel Bulacu’s case, the first element prevails over the second, in the spirit of the art he serves through an exceptional activity and that he generously shares with his students. 

Aurel Bulacu - Chimera
Aurel Bulacu – Chimera
Aurel Bulacu - Chimera
Aurel Bulacu – Chimera
Aurel Bulacu - Chimera
Aurel Bulacu – Chimera

 

 

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