Catalin-Podoleanu--(7)

Cătălin Podoleanu – Synthetic and Analytic Abstraction

No. 45 / March 2021

Mihai Plămădeală, art critic

 

There is a category of people who patronize the frameless paintings, with the feeling that they are not finished or that they are missing something vital, perhaps the most important thing. For many of them, a work of art must match the sofa to be worth buying. At another level, there are viewers who can accept the figurative, possibly in classical compositional formulas, but who categorically reject abstract art, experimental art, conceptual art, minimalism or, in general, postmodern art. Often, motivations fall within the scope of the well-known phrase “it is not art; I can do that too ”.

I have described, of course, only a part of the public of the visual arts, from us and not only, especially those considered decadent in traditional communist circles, but it is interesting to know who are the producers of these types of art, for example, art abstract. One of them is Cătălin Podoleanu, the protagonist of this analysis. Before him (and all today’s abstract painters) were big names like Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky or Pollock. One question that can be asked is whether contemporary artists choose abstract art in relation to their illustrious predecessors or for other reasons. Giving up subjects and iconography and moving the artistic activity strictly in the area of ​​mastery may be convenient for some of them. We must not forget that painting means, above all else, color. Furthermore, everything is just about organization and rhythm.

If a painter uses a (new) palette for an artwork, abstract or figurative, at the end of it we find that the palette looks exciting from a visual point of view, each color value on it corresponding to one or more on the original canvas. The lucrative need for order amplifies the rhythmic effects of the palette.

 

Cătălin Podoleanu

 

In the exhibition project I analyze, Cătălin Podoleanu actioned in two different ways, without dividing himself, on one hand in an expressionist abstraction of a gestural nature, somehow organic, and on another in a geometric abstraction. In both types, the pigment prevails over the visual sign, seen as a chromatic area rather than as an intervention or vector. The artist bets on harmony, consonantally resolving the frequency differences of his palettes. He starts from a dominant color placed as a background, over which he juxtaposes geometric shapes or concise strokes. The result is a series of calibrated works, with strong decorative valences, whose elements are placed, unequivocally, at the same level, on the same layer, despite overlapping shapes (solved by translucent colors) or suggestion of planimetric intersections by oblique lines. This effect is obtained by the artist through the use of parallel, vertical and horizontal lines, which highlight each oblique and vanishing points corresponding to the shapes in which it participates. It is a semi-illusionist trick cultivated with the participation of chromatics.

 

Cătălin Podoleanu

 

Returning to the motivations regarding the choice of the abstract route by the Romanian artist, I found a possible national social phenomenon, which I treated in detail in a book I wrote earlier, “An incursion into the Romanian painting of the ’90s : Then and now ”. Over the course of a century, Romanian painting has recovered the gap of about three hundred years from that of Central and Western Europe, in order to fully align and even be part of the avant-garde in the interwar period, especially through the Dada movement. With the Second World War and especially with the communism that followed in Eastern Europe, Romanian art followed the path of socialist realism, at a time when abstract expressionism triumphed in the free world. In our country, abstractism was only an act of a minority of painters during the communist period. The change of the regime at the end of the ’80s meant a massive adoption of abstract art in Romania, ie a logical continuation from the point where the direction of development was stopped. The discussion is much broader; Between 1950 and 1967, there were strong logistical support programs for modern Western art as part of the Cold War. Frances Stonor Saunders’ book, The Cultural Cold War, is enlightening in this respect.

 

Cătălin Podoleanu

 

Educated in the ’90s, Cătălin Podoleanu was part of an active cultural trend of that period. Furthermore, his research and professional projects have largely meant cultivating these landmarks. The exhibition from 2021, in Bucharest, involved, in its eclecticism, the participation with abstract works, through which the artist detached himself, without dissociating, from the other artists participating in the exhibition “Eclectic” and also on the walls of the Visual Arts Center Bucharest.

Cătălin Podoleanu
Cătălin Podoleanu
Cătălin Podoleanu

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