No. 2 / April 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article partially published on Lettre Internationale, no.110/2019.
David Leonid Olteanu’s relationship with ceramics is biunivocal. On the one hand, he has reservations about the conditions imposed by the material and the technologies that lead to the final form of the artworks, on the other hand, he is attracted by experiments on the chemical composition of substances he uses, especially those related to combustion. The fact that he cannot fully control what happens during the final stages of his work makes him constantly looking, but also to insist on the modelling stage. The quest is equivalent to the risk of colour changes, deformations, even physical degradation of the parts, all due to the use of intuitive chemistry. The meticulousness combined with the joy of working often results in the imprinting of the created pieces.
However, it is not the experiment that occupies the main place in his creation, nor the craftsmanship, but the ideas, more precisely the shapes taken by the morphological ideas underlying his projects. For this reason, David is an atypical ceramic artist. Basically, there is no situation of not reaching well to what he proposed himself, in terms of ceramics, but the so-called standard roads do not seem to address him, so he uses them only if he subordinates them to ideas outside of ceramics, for example to get the shapes it needs as such, to build something further.
It is interesting how the elements related to a certain logic remain inscribed in it, regardless of the degree of autonomy or derivation of some of them. The arrangement on levels, from another point of view on eons, represents a distinctive mark of the artist. It should be noted that the algorithm is always performed consciously, but each time activated by empirical motivations. In other words, the process behind creation is not a scholarly, precious, sought after or calculated one. Instead, various readings or personal revelations become generators of subjects, in versions adapted to the daily experiences that determined them.
Regarding a recent project, defining for the artist, Revelation, materialized with a personal exhibition at Galateca Gallery in Bucharest in 2019, it represents the development by sign and magnitude of an important previous step in his biography, the participation in the Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2017, where he was awarded. The theme of the biennial, Earth: Creativity and Sustainability, stimulated him to imagine a work different from everything he had done before, but also from the solutions to which the ceramic material invites. On the whole, a sphere was inscribed (suspended) in a parallelepiped. It’s just that the sphere was made of flat, articulated and modular pieces, made of white porcelain, representing people. The parallelepiped, in fact a metallic contour, was originally intended as a load-bearing structure, but its force enhanced the work as a whole. At various heights, individual characters or groups of characters were suspended, ambivalently suggesting detachment from the sphere, but also falling, flying or being attracted to it.
The artist developed the project for a year by introducing in his visual discourse new coordinates, such as the relationships between dimensions, between plane and spatial geometric figures and, of course, between materials. Also, the relationship with the gallery space, a large one, several hundred square meters, with a ceiling five meters high, has become a stake in itself. The different heights at which the parts or assemblies were placed played a special role, which could not be marked in the installation from Florence, whose size did not exceed one cubic meter. Thus, the prosaic reality of the suspension and the connections between the elements had a strong correspondent in the corpus of ideas at the origin of the project.
For David Olteanu, all existing things, material and immaterial, are connected by visible and invisible connections, not always logical. I bring up the series of installations made of and with syringes, Introspection. They are assembled in a way that excludes both functionality and cultural connotations. One might think that the reasons behind these facilities refer to the sick world we live in, drug addiction or anything else related to illness and healing. However, for David Olteanu the syringe is an object with a plastic function, which can look even more interesting in an organically developed structure, like all the structures he conceives. Geometric rigor and matrix arrangement are excluded from his visual lexicon.
Another type of connection, seen as a junction, connection, but also relationship, this time with connotations outside the visual, is the series of bottles and glasses, Memory. The glasses do not have an inner volume, so they cannot receive the fluid from the bottles, and the bottles, in turn flattened and deformed by partial melting, are transformed into (useless) lids of the pseudo-glasses. Although born from an anecdotal spirit, the series impresses with its form, possibly with its surreal, somewhat Salvadoran aura, without intending to convey prohibitive messages. Moulding the glass on the bottle involves the relative reversal of the relationship between the two. The outside of the bottle becomes the inside volume, while the debtor-receiver function is completely circumvented. The theme was derived to the point where the size of the glasses increased compared to that of the bottles, the glasses, this time with inner volume, receiving the bottles in them, in integrum.
A recurring theme in David Olteanu’s creation is that of connections, communicating interior spaces, extensions and modulation, Dynamic Cylinders being a reference theme in this sense. All these are intertwined in a series of projects, some of them quite distant at first sight from those stated, but still created for such reasons. From 1995 to ’96, the artist drawed the attention through a project with an impressive visual force, Spatial Dialogue: a series of medium-large ceramic cubes and parallelepipeds, hollow on the inside and partially perforated, were connected by a tubular network. The number of outputs and implicitly of the inputs exceeded that of the connections, this giving the feeling that the installation can be completed indefinitely and that it will be integrated in any space it would be placed. From here to traditional ceramics, for example pottery, is an extremely long distance.
Anthropomorphic characters appear periodically in the artist’s creation, in the most diverse ways and forms. In one of his notable projects, entitled Women Inside, the characters are made up of sharp fragments that induce danger. In another, Adam and Eve, the shapes of female and male characters transpire volumetrically from the flat surfaces of ceramic bricks. Here we find the idea of inscribing one form in another, but also the modular treatment, respectively the configuration of a superstructure. The bricks send to the building, whether it means to be built or to build something. We also note the call to the rectangle.
The sphere could not remain outside the discourse and artistic preoccupations of David Olteanu. As we mentioned earlier in another context, the artist is attracted to Gnostic philosophical systems that look at the world in the form of sets of derivatives of some first realities. In Galaxy, the model of representation is that of concentric spheres, each corresponding to a particular degree of knowledge, but all true. This idea was represented in the project developed on the Florence – Bucharest axis, but not only.
And because I have reached this point, it is necessary to point out that the artist, abstract in general approaches, tends to always anchor himself in a certain concrete, and this concrete has benign connotations. Up to a point, David Olteanu goes on the path of figurative sculpture-ceramics, from another point on the path of conceptual art and minimalism. These landmarks perhaps capture best the artist’s launch from ceramics to idea.