Posts in category: Reviews

The exhibition “Phantasmagoria” (2014), signed by Raluca Arnăutu and organized by Anaid Art Gallery, brought together forty artworks made in a span of two years. What caught my attention was the theme that the artist had announced since 2012 through an exhibition, “Zoolandia”, hosted by the same gallery.

Represented as part of normality in Egyptian culture, the nude becomes for the ancient Greeks, later for the Romans, a symbol of human virtues. In the Early Middle Ages, nakedness represents humility, or rather humiliation, decay. Adam and Eve, related to the Fall Into Sin (as an iconographic theme), the Crucifixion or putti (ornamental angels) are among the few opportunities to represent nudity. With the Renaissance, ancient values are rediscovered, the valences of the nude developing exponentially.

Cristian Diţoiu’s new exhibition can be defined rather by what it is not, than by what each commentator, even relatively informed, assumes to be. At a purely descriptive level, we are dealing with colored squares, arranged on various backgrounds, in turn, rectangular in shape. The golden ratio, constant in the artist’s algorithm, a morphological system that is both non-random and post-minimalist, is not a real stake of the works, as are the chromatic values and the tonal relations between them.

Bucharest was not, is not and never will be of Eugen Raportoru, I mean, from a political, administrative or economic point of view, the artist delimiting himself from opportunism, fame and brand, in favor of painting, a sincere and honest painting, from which he removed any trace of spectacle, anecdote or story. His vision of the big city individualizes him, giving him a unique position among his colleagues, which is also foreign to his intentions.

Marius Cristea is an artist of projects, if we admit the existence of such a stylistic category. The way he works both with the parts and with the whole is his main identity attribute. The material side is happily intertwined with the conceptual one. In other words, each work, be it painting, drawing or object, sometimes all this in one place, has an aesthetic value in itself, participating at the same time in a truth more comprehensive than that of the laws of internal composition, the result of which is. A major feature of it is that in installations he approaches the object with pictorial means, and in painting he attacks the figurative by abstract means.

For Relu Biţulescu’s artistic work, there is no established specialized terminology in Romania and in the world. This fact defines the unique character of his artworks, always composite, unconventional, experimental, which can be interpreted as assemblies, painted objects, or even installations.
After a period of creation that we could call “Stairway to Heaven”, after the name of the exhibition from 2011 and the catalog edited on that occasion, he started in 2015 working for another exhibition project, entitled “Between the Worlds”.

One of those exhibitions that the viewer will certainly not forget for the rest of his life is Tronicart 1300, by Gheorghe Ilea, organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest and Plan B Gallery (Cluj-Napoca) at Sala Dalles (Bucharest), during March – April 2012.

Tara is a character in the Romanian visual arts who can be annoying and often does. Unlike other artist-characters, von Neudorf is not the hero of scandals created for the sake of scandal and has no favorite clients, nor is he the worst or most frustrated man on earth. He strikes with the same ease in the targets he chooses, without hatred or passion, according to algorithms he knows. Drawing a parallel with field tennis, we would compare him to Rod Laver, Pete Sampras or, closer to us, Roger Federer. Tara do not use slices, but his forehand hits hard and always gets the point.

The canvases offer many new things, given that everything is as we knew before. What is interesting in them are the atmosphere, the state and the story, i.e. the subjective factors that stand between nature and the way it was transposed on the medium, because we are dealing with an artist-storyteller. The works are stories of the end of autumn and winter, of the snow in a Transylvania outside of space and time, completely different from the one in Bram Stoker’s novel.

The distinctive mark of the project “The Story Collector”, signed by the ceramic artist Lucia Lobonţ is the strongly graphic side of the exhibits. Lucia Lobonţ focuses in her artistic work on the subject rather than on the three-dimensional object.