No. 37 / November 2020
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic – article published in Tribuna magazine no.436 / November 1-15, 2020
Characterized by a single word, the painting of Dorel Petrehuș is, before anything else, alive. Literally, the artist uses intense colors, often pure, related by strong contrasts, and figuratively organizes his compositions in an organic way. For the show to be total, its signs are basically anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, in that order. In other words, man is the measure of all things in his creation. Morphologically speaking, he is a colorist, an action painter and also a Fauve. The portrait, which eludes both realism and artistic anatomy, plays a central role in many of his canvases.

Of course, things are not as simple as it might seem, because, in Petrehuș’s case, the stages and artistic reasons prevail in the act of creation, being landmarks partially independent of the resulting artworks. Many details from the artist’s canvases could be genuine abstract works. However, they are always placed in the service of figurative visual signs. The fluid and concise line through which he constructs his artworks seems to have its reasons in nothing but automatic writing. However, these are the result of extensive searches prior to their application to the canvas, which is true in a way, if not spontaneous, at least casual. As in the case of Sorin Ilfoveanu, in another way than the great artist, the lexicon of seemingly simple and repetitive signs is the result of (tens of) thousands of hours of tracing them in preliminary sketches. Yes, at some point, the artist can use them without thinking about them, but only about the results he wants to achieve. In this way he frees himself from the dangers that the road can pose. Often, artists start a work with some thoughts and complete them with others, seduced by accidents or conditioned by various technical limitations that they had not taken into account.

I noticed Dorel Petrehuș in 2011, on the occasion of an edition of the Baia Mare Great Annual Exhibition. Paradoxically, the artist then exhibited a series of hyperrealistic canvases, in which he represented several works by the sculptor Mircea Roman, in tandem with his original works, exhibited nearby. Dimensions comparable to the original “models” and the suggestion of three-dimensionality revealed an artist master of the academic means of painting. However, this is not the direction in which Petrehuș is renowed. Beyond the possibly anecdotal or ambiguous side and the friendship of the two artists (one from Negrești-Oaș, the other from Târgu Lăpuș), the painter gave way to an idea and that’s it. He did well in terms of mastery, but then returned to his lifelong projects. One of the arguments of the “Mircea Roman project” was that both are interested in their work on the anthropomorphic side. This is, however, a secondary issue.

Dorel Petrehuș works just as well, here well is equivalent to the constant and at the same time to the surprising, on surfaces of any size. His images resist oversizing, just as, on large canvases, the compositions created can develop fractally, by multiplying modules or visual signs, as such. Reduced to scale, in the pages of a catalog, they keep their unitary character, regardless of dimensions or variations on the given theme.
Dorel Petrehuș’s characters are aware of their own condition, understanding the function that the symbol has in the dynamics of general existence. Thus, graphic signs appear in his canvases that send to the most diverse religious beliefs and ideas, be they avramic, mitraic, totemic or even animistic. In the represented “scenes”, the numinous completely replaces morality. We are not dealing with stories, parables, legends, behavioral guides, prophecies or sermons in pictures. The Old Testament tree with the afferent serpent, the angelic wings, the New Testament cross, the sacrificial blood connected with it, but also with the bullfighting, the overlap of people with animals, the embryonic metamorphoses, respectively the birth seen as emergence or initiation, are constantly permutable in its creation.

The artist interprets anatomy and zoology exclusively as branches of morphological biology, without taking into account physiology. The shape and structure of organisms become the subject of meditation in his works, without bionics having any role in the proposed visual interrogations. The biological models he painted refuse optimization, accentuating the visceral and exalting the limit, seen as a joint restriction. The images he creates are double-organic: on the one hand we have the whole work, which lives as such or in relation to each other, regardless of their inclusion in diptychs, triptychs or series, on the other hand, the concrete shapes in the field they constitute real cells, which assert their individuality and seek to subordinate the living space in which they have been placed.
Dorel Petrehuș oscillates between concrete and abstract, finding his starting points in both extremes. Realistically thought-out elements or physical parts of its canvases, regardless of their content, have non-figurative solutions, this happening at the level of shaded surfaces, chromatic interferences or juxtapositions. On the other hand, color palettes, lines and random dots, in essence, abstract, tend to group into recognizable structures.
His painting tends to be two-dimensional, unfolding in a Cubist manner. Surrealistic, even Dadaist reflexes also make their presence felt, attenuated by Action Paiting and interventions, in a personal discourse. The caesura is often the axis of development of his compositions. Rhythmic pauses are offset by energetic touches and vibrant colors. The chromatic center of gravity always falls inside the canvases, even if the vectors counterbalance by expansion the suggested implosion effect. The artist has created a coherent system of forms and chromatic relations, to which he remains faithful to the end.
Surprises, which occur from canvas to canvas, are related to the laws of internal composition. The female silhouette determines and at the same time generates undulating contours, somehow sensual. Questions about existence, identity, uniqueness, beauty, daydreaming and sometimes sexuality are the basic elements of a personal and fully assumed visual thinking system.