No. 18 / December 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Tribuna magazine, no.315/ 16th – 31st of October 2015
One of the most surprising visual art projects in Romania in the last two decades is Cosmin Paulescu’s “Supra Super Subditus” solo show. It is a post-postmodern initiative of interpretation, respectively of re-evaluating the ideas of collective subconscious and automatic writing, painting & drawing.
The title is a wordplay that starts from Suprarealism, as it is called the historical avant-garde current in Romanian, continues with Surrealism, the English name and finds its terminus in Latin Subditus, which means subject. The first artworks of the suite were completed by the artist in the mid-90s and were kept aside in impeccable condition, for no less than two decades, waiting to be exhibited, so that in 2013 the artwork series knew a surprising continuation, equivalent with the closing of a circle.
From a technical point of view, because the artist’s hand and eye are flawless, nothing has been left to chance, whether it is consonant or dissonant chromatic chords, rhythmic relationships, layout or trompe l’œil. But the most interesting part starts here.
The landmarks set are iconological rather than iconographic. Beyond a vast visual culture, Cosmin Paulescu, Cozo, as he signs and is known to the art-loving public, possesses qualities of an extremely rare form of maturity, combined with emotional intelligence. His closeness to Salvador Dali and René Magritte is one that excludes comparison, parentage, but also caution. The distance and the good measure, the fair reporting and the emphasis put on abstract elements inscribed on other coordinates than those of which the two leaders of Surrealism were interested.
In fact, Cozo returns somewhere to the confluence of Dada with Surrealism, to go on a path opened by Hannah Höch and Giorgio de Chirico, as if the history of then and until now (of art) had not been written. The result is a fresh and at the same time cryptic painting. We can discuss the nature of the unnatural, this being the state of mind we experience in the act of reading the images. The artworks are loaded with a special magnetism: we recognize everything we see, at the level of the element, but the general choreography, although apparently familiar, is detached, if not from the world of darkness, at least from a parallel universe. His overflowing fantasy leads to solutions sometimes inspired by collage and Appropriation Art, other times to Max Ernst-type metamorphoses.
The project brings together oil on canvas artworks or tempera on wood and objects, some of them parietal, but the whole works at the same time as an installation. The viewer is reserved the privileged observation point, thus being able to become a spectator of a dream world, from which the nightmare was completely excluded. The visual experience is equivalent to the ordeal by labyrinth.
The animal “characters”, especially the ichthyological ones, are the leitmotif of the series. Human being also finds a privileged place in this world dominated by mystery, a world whose landmarks remain benign. The artist is generally concerned with the representation of the human body, this theme being recurrent in his creation. Among the utterances of the proposed figures we note the self-portraits made in the manner of Fernando Botero Angulo. The visual quote plays a leading role in the given context.
A hallmark of the above-mentioned compositions would be that elements that do not have a place next to each other in the real world, work together to a logic impossible to penetrate by rational means.
Heraldic lions sleep on embryonic planets, swarms of fish create spiral junctions between heaven and earth, snails sailors cross seas and oceans, while sharks fly, like Zeppelins, over the sky where Earth can be seen as if by chance. All this at a time when in Romania the new figurative wave is in power, even in fashion, a direction of research and expression that is both honorable and viable.
Supra Super Subditus is a surprise of proportions, especially since Cosmin Paulescu, Dean of the Faculty of Decorative Arts and Design at the National University of Art Bucharest, has been active in the aforementioned period in the area of mural art, installation and performance. As for the covered subjects and the manner he used in the presented project, they really transcend reality.
