No. 9 / August 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published on Observator Cultural magazine, no.673/17th of May 2014
On the 10th of May, 2013 took place at the Dalles Hall, Bucharest, a large retrospective exibition, Bricking, signed by Marin Gherasim, organised in partnership with the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in which the public has the opportunity to admire artworks made during four decades of activity. The Romanian Cultural Institute in London also opened a solo show of the artist, on the same period and with the same thematic and morphological coordinates. The two mentioned exhibitions can be visited till the end of May.
Beyond the aspects related to excellence in art, recognition or the potential audience of the subject, the two spaces exhibition I am referring to is equivalent to a journal in images. We have the privilege, as visitors, not only to admire special artworks, many of them familiar to the art lover in catalogs rather than through the exercise of memory, but also to know the artist through the signage and arrangement of the whole of the exhibited works.

After a relatively short expressionist period, partially overlapping with a surreal one, Marin Gherasim adopted from the beginning of the ’70s, the theme, style and manner to which he would be faithful to this day. The cycles of the Apse, of the Tower, of the Mountain, of the Column or of the Capital, all these constituted in categories, the corresponding works bearing even the respective names, meant more than a corpus of themes and a direction of development: they are identity landmarks. The subjects are unequivocally related to the sacredness seen from a Christian perspective, but the resulting paintings do not aim to be and are not religious ones. Marin Gherasim’s artworks live exclusively by visual virtues. The relations between an extremely subtle chromaticism and the line equivalent to the iconic itself, if we admit the stylistic license, are attributes of the artist’s personal guide. The apse seen as a central plan, the sectioned mountain, the column represented from the frontal perspective or the tower geometrized by subdivision into polygons, become unmistakable marks of a balanced painting, coherent and in full agreement with their creator.

To paint in this way for two decades during communist times, as well as to avoid connections to the honorable trends of the capitalist-democratic world of Romania in those years, is an assumed vertical attitude, without that ever to be a purpose in itself. Reasons have always been related to art in the creation of Marin Gherasim, and this can be easely remarked in his work. After the change of our political regime, the master continued his natural path, having no reason to make changes in his visual discourse.

What’s suprinsing in Marin Gherasim’s painting is the way he always manages to be different, being always the same. As Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla went from one end of his creation to the other on the coordinates of the traditional Argentine tango, converted into Tango Nuevo, as William Faulkner placed the action of all his novels in the imaginary land of Yoknopatawpha, or as Paul Cézanne constantly returned to Mont Sainte-Victoire series, Marin Gherasim finds the center of his creation and artistic life in the apses he created, whether it is the Golden Apse, the Memory of the Apse or the Reconstruction of the Apse, cycles corresponding to the stages he went through and that can be found at Dalles. Such an exhibition is the ideal opportunity for the art lover to transcend the pages of the catalog published a few years ago, through direct contact with the canvases. The oil itself, the one used in painting, is a powerful, symbolic material. Those who have become accustomed to its smell can never forget it, but this is already a story about the painter and collector.



