No. 25 / April 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in the book “10 for the Xth decade” (Ed. Sigma , Bucharest, 2010) and in the exhibition catalogue “Accent” (Squaremedia, Bucharest, 2018)
The non-figurative, definitive and irreversible option of Florin Mocanu, otherwise an excellent illustrator, represents a perfect plea for color, and not the expression of an iconoclastic conception. The chromatic relations, the tuning, the rhythm, or the game of perception in relation to the complementary ones are just some of the visible landmarks of his artistic activity. But if we accept the metaphorical difference between looking and seeing, what really matters in Florin Mocanu’s work are reason and sensitivity. These notions, equivalent to the truth of art, but also of his personality, prevail over techniques and procedures. Decorative attributes are completely rejected, as are the axes of symmetry. Organized in layers, most often by juxtaposition, the compositions live by themselves, equidistant from the gestural and chromatic abstraction. It is a fully assumed path. The artist does not describe or follow the path of analogies, but suggests. Under the given conditions, the interrogations regarding being and painting coincide.
In a time when the new trend of figurative painting is in fashion, the artist proposes a truly abstract art. Deliberately abandoning the subject in favor of colors and shapes, Mocanu places himself in an area that always starts from the gestural abstraction sometimes reaching to the chromatic one.
Equidistant from the works of Jackson Pollock, but also of Mark Rothko, the Romanian artist has its own motivations regarding the way he chose to paint from over twenty years ago, connected less to the history and the theories of abstract art and more to his own philosophical and esthetical questions. Interested in the metaphor of time before time, in other words, in the colors probably preceding the light from the first day of Creation, Florin Mocanu established a series of conceptual guide marks of cosmogonist origin, that he interpret in a live, free, visual, not at all scientological manner.
A skilled drawer, Florin Mocanu centers his creativity to finding the optimal ratio between the colors and the shapes they make in an abstract context. The fact that in his studio the music and the painting coexist in a symbiotic way and that this music is deliberately and repeatedly signed by Tangerine Dream, expresses the truth that the imaginary determines the artistic conscience and not only.
In an interview I took him in 2010, Florin Mocanu stated:
“In 1990 I was still “preparing” in the studios of those who initiated the future students into the secrets of success in admission to the Arts Academy. I worked on this project for four years, starting with 1986. 1990, the year of my entry into college, was one of general optimism and enthusiasm I was not, as I mentioned, one of the lucky ones admitted on the first try, I was already 25 years old, but some of my colleagues had tried it ten times even.I was somewhere in the middle, in my old age, among my colleagues. In the first year a selection was made followed by various specializations. At that time I was much closer to figurative painting and I had nothing to do with the easel, because I had prepared for mural art. I finally got to painting, to the master Ştefan Câlţia.
Towards the end of my college years I experienced a turning point; I moved away from figurative art and slowly, slowly I tried to build my own path through the relationship with the non-figurative, with abstract expressionism, trying a greater freedom in expression. I also flirted with the surreal elements, a period I remember from the perspective of the sketches made in the Botanical Garden. I drew vegetable structures reconfigured into fantastic landscapes, in an attempt to create another world. As a technique, I limited myself and still do to the brush and light fingerprint interventions.
I was never much influenced by the outside environment, in the sense that I do not have a frond spirit, so I did not have any creative protest. My peers also manifested themselves in a parallel painting with the social and the political. Sporadic and insignificant for the conjuncture of the ’90s, there were also initiatives to flirt with the surrounding realities. Most of those from the ’90s-’96 generation, the first “completely free”, as it was called then, seem to have put their eventual passions into everyday life and only the imagination in art. Probably the training practiced by the Academy of Arts in my student years – classical, less rebellious – was one of the causes.
Many of us listened to Western art, not understanding what was really going on at the time, because we didn’t have the tools to do it. We were imbued with Matisse, Picasso or post-war American art, which caught on very well with us in the years ’93 -’94 (I remember, there were albums very much loved by me and my colleagues). I think that the American experience, with its six or seven years of attempts at abstract expressionism and the emergence of Pop Art in reaction to this movement, was mimicked in our country in the 1990s, with a delay of only half a century. About how long the period of socialist realism in Romania lasted.
The years I spent on the sidelines, waiting my turn to be admitted to Fine Arts, were not wasted, although then they seemed so, because the chance to be a student in the first series after the fall of communism meant an opening that I would not have had part in case of success “from the first” in college. Sometimes every cloud has a silver lining.”
