No. 48 / December 2023
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic
(article published in the exhibiton’s catalogue)
Mihnea Badea’s personal exhibition, “Apostasy XXI”, organized in December 2023 at the UAP Ploiesti Galleries, brings up a series of fundamental issues regarding the position of man in relation to faith, morality and ethics, in a historical and anticipative perspective.
In the creation of the artist, the theme occupies the central place, prevailing over the technical means. Thus, the line and chromatic meet and intertwine organically, complementing each other. In principle, in painting the color is subordinated to the drawing, the artist often intervening on his canvases in the idea of highlighting the visual signs and motifs imagined, instituted in real scenographic icons. As for the graphics, the drawing is greatly potentiated by color. Derivation of the proposed forms and subsequent gestural interventions represent nothing but the reverse of the procedures applied to the paintings, the resulting images being formally different, but with the same expected stylistic results.
The artist exalts a series of narrative, mythological, theological, cultural or even real-world references, gathered in a personal carousel of (neo)expressionist images. Strictly formal, the atmosphere that dominates the “Apostasy” project is a dystopian one, with touches of both scientology and religious art, and, inscriptible on an imaginary axis that could very well link the film of Fritz Lang, “Metropolis”, to the mural creation of Father Arsenie Boca (from Draganescu Church).
The free association proposed above belongs exclusively to the undersigned critic. As for the artist, he placed his theme in an imaginary, timeless Rome, symbol of the absolute center of global power, which is sometimes approaching Babylon, in which the public renunciation of religion (christianity), the appearance of false prophets or the attempt to establish a new world order are the main landmarks of contemporaneity. The message, however, is a positive one, in the sense that celestial harmony will be restored in the name of truth, light and life.
Mihnea Badea’s visual interrogations find their most appropriate verbal form in Andre Malraux’s aphoristic statement, according to which “the 21st century will be religious or won’t be”.
Summarizing, the relations between content, message and technical means, as well as between universal symbols and personal vision imply a fully coherent artistic will and at the same time a viable representation system. The artist has the great ability to maintain an optimal connection between the literary sources used and their visual representation, avoiding redundancies and preserving the total autonomy of the images created from the invoked iconography.
