No. 33 / August 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Observator Cultural magazine, no. 707 / 2014
Bucharest was not, is not and never will be of Eugen Raportoru, I mean, from a political, administrative or economic point of view, the artist delimiting himself from opportunism, fame and brand, in favor of painting, a sincere and honest painting, from which he removed any trace of spectacle, anecdote or story. His vision of the big city individualizes him, giving him a unique position among his colleagues, which is also foreign to his intentions. These lines refer to his exhibition at the Simeza Gallery, entitled “Bucharest 2013”, an event curated by the great visual artist Marcel Bunea, who made the selection of the works, coordinated the organization of the exhibition and proposed the title.
Raportoru has been dealing in his canvases, for more than three decades, since his first personal exhibition, organized in 1975, the urban subject, in this case Bucharest, this being his main theme, from which he sometimes detaches himself only in favor of static natures and much less often, of the portrait. Its constants are the architecture and the play of light. Characters, aggressive landmarks, from posters, stalls to cars are basically eliminated from the compositions. In fact, almost the entire diurnal potential is eluded. One disparate element, however, reminds us of what period of time we are in.

The detail is subsumed to the morphological order, responsible for the rhythm of the canvases, by placing the architectures on lines or points of force and their geometric organization, in accordance with the gold section. In other words, the angles, with the corresponding optical aberrations, play the main role in the artist’s creation, which always reserves its privileged observation point, a position he implicitly shares with the viewer.
The exhibition is entitled, in the most prosaic way, “Bucharest 2013”, so there is no ambiguity regarding its intentions and finality. We are dealing with the contemporary city, Eugen Raportoru working in the intimacy of the workshop on Carol Boulevard, after pictures taken by himself. However, what we see in his works are images of a possible city a century ago. The artist did not cheat in any way, but transposed the reality, we could say in a matrix structure. Everything related to modernity is transposed, in the system of his visual thinking, in a non-figurative area, part of a wall without windows, of the pavement, of an area of light or shadow.

We can say that we are dealing with the new old Bucharest. This would be Raportoru’s brand, a classification that has its place and purpose only in the context of this comment. Looking at the paintings in question, we have the feeling that we know the places shown. Seeing one of his paintings, I could bet that a group of houses is on Calea Moşilor, the part from Saint George Church. The artist denied the false certainty, revealing the true model of those represented: a street corner near Gemini Square. With this information, suddenly, the cityscape overlapped with its real counterpart.
The artist’s works seduce by chromatics, an extremely small palette, three basic colors, close to the maximum of their neutral values (colored grays), not infrequently related to other colors, violent, which break by changing the rhythm a cadence otherwise extremely static.

The kaleidoscopic carousel of lines leaves legible the iconic shape of houses, blocks of flats or street furniture, whether it is lanterns, benches, wrought iron fences or traffic signs. Balanced from a tonal point of view, Eugen Raportoru’s canvases talk about full and empty, about brushstroke and form, about objective reality and interpretation. Not at all explicit, the artist does not limit himself to the matching of colors, but keeps through the presented the connection with that beyond, to which the viewer also belongs. An open window makes you think of the interior bounded by it, just as the path of a gas pipe attached to a building induces the idea that life has its course, parallel to the strict world of painting.
The discreet line between how things are in themselves and how we perceive them, is what triggers the mechanisms of reception, of a good reception. The walls without windows, which appear with predilection in the artist’s canvases, through hatches, lines and brushstrokes, do not represent limits, but mentally send to the houses once attached to them. It’s a kind of memento mori; one by one, the old will give way to the new – what seems eternal today, tomorrow will only be a memory.
The reasoning is also valid at the level of painting, of approaching it. The new figurative wave, which dominates the painting scene in today’s Romania, has largely replaced the old tradition, the interwar one, which at one time was the only way worthy of being continued. So much so that the new does not always overlap with the good and by no means with the beautiful. It does not make sense to paint today as it was painted a few centuries or decades ago, but it does not make sense to import with copy – paste the crystallized solutions into other systems of artistic thinking. Painting cannot be fooled, at most those who trust the specialists of small or large plagiarism can be confused. Eugen Raportoru is an honest painter, just as his creation is honest.
