Dorel-Petrehus-portret

Dorel Petrehuș

Characterized by a single word, the painting of Dorel Petrehuș is, before anything else, alive. Literally, the artist uses intense colors, often pure, related by strong contrasts, and figuratively organizes his compositions in an organic way. For the show to be total, its signs are basically anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, in that order. In other words, man is the measure of all things in his creation. Morphologically speaking, he is a colorist, an action painter and also a Fauve. The portrait, which eludes both realism and artistic anatomy, plays a central role in many of his canvases.

Of course, things are not as simple as it might seem, because, in Petrehuș’s case, the stages and artistic reasons prevail in the act of creation, being landmarks partially independent of the resulting artworks. Many details from the artist’s canvases could be genuine abstract works. However, they are always placed in the service of figurative visual signs. The fluid and concise line through which he constructs his artworks seems to have its reasons in nothing but automatic writing. However, these are the result of extensive searches prior to their application to the canvas, which is true in a way, if not spontaneous, at least casual. As in the case of Sorin Ilfoveanu, in another way than the great artist, the lexicon of seemingly simple and repetitive signs is the result of (tens of) thousands of hours of tracing them in preliminary sketches. Yes, at some point, the artist can use them without thinking about them, but only about the results he wants to achieve. In this way he frees himself from the dangers that the road can pose. Often, artists start a work with some thoughts and complete them with others, seduced by accidents or conditioned by various technical limitations that they had not taken into account.

 

Mihai Plămădeală, art critic 


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