No. 22 / Feburary 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Arhitectura magazine, no.3/2015
Sorin Purcaru’s creation lays under the sign of interferences between graphics, classical sculpture and metal sculpture. The solutions offered by each direction are passed through the filter of the others. Thus, the artist’s drawings can be transposed in volume, and the three-dimensional shapes made of steel, with the angel grinder and the welding machine, allow the possible subsequent casting in bronze.
A good connoisseur of techniques and materials, Sorin Purcaru, teacher at the University of Visual Arts and Design in Iaşi, Romania, concentrates his creative forces in the area of the figurative, a metamorphic figurative and not infrequently allegorical. More precisely, the artist extracts the solutions related to the structure from a figurative, often animal, to then derive the partial forms to the junction with other solutions, obtained by the same algorithm. The works involve combinations and jointings of complementary forms that are related to distinct ideas. The use of the foot (biological – avian or mammal) as a pedestal is a mark of the sculptor, which can send tangentially to the area of Surrealism.
The artist ensures the coherence of the pieces he conceives and produce by finding an optimal degree of stylization of the component parts and by the continuity between them. The bell and anthropomorphic characters appear recurrently, especially in his small artworks, with interesting details and textures. As for the medium and large artworks, the total or partial usage of pigment has the function of signaling, namely of placing in geographical, topographic, climatic context.
The playful and at the same time benign character of the sculptures created by Sorin Purcaru recommends them for Site-Specific Art environmental projects. Of course, each artwork has its own idea, but also the sponsor, in other words a series of determinants. A tourist resort, an industrial or university city, a children’s center or one for elders, have their own particularities, which the architect and the visual artist must take into account.
In just few words, this is a introduction in Sorin Purcaru’s artistic thinking.
