In the ROOTS exhibition, the Romanian heritage art and architecture, the modern and the contemporary creation are reciprocally potentiating each other, asserting the National Heritage Institute as a preserver of the immovable cultural and architectural values.

Intention and Message

ROOTS is a contemporary art quintessential visual discourse employing the Brutalisme Lyrique syntax to formulate apocryphal definitions of entropy. As the exhibited canvases will be visually examined and, hopefully, critically appreciated, this discourse with turn into a dialogue. As a matter of fact, the notion of dialogue is a foundational one for the Brutalisme Lyrique, which is a pictorial synthesis, a convergence point between the European Abstraction Lyrique and the nybrutalism architectural style. We are referring to the European Abstraction Lyrique as the post-war painting style evolution of Modernist principle, centered on an extremely subjective expressivity, as opposed to the programmatic character of Cubism or Surrealism. The reference to nybrutalism points out to the architectural minimalism defined in the middle of the 20th century in direct relation to the terms béton brut and art brut (a unifying notion that favors artistic expressions outside the canons of the respective era). Finally, to simplify the grid of interpretation suggested to the viewer, the notion of entropy is used in the sense of inevitable disintegration, of evolution towards an emptying of perceptible order. However, the lack of predictability usually associated with this process is a nuanced one in the Brutalisme Lyrique context; the nuances are the result of the artist’s will to define a unique pathway; such nuances are afforded by the search for sculptural volumes, for gravitational mergers, for the tactile, for the sustainable monumentality, for integrative architectural metabolism, for tectonic essences and for wide-breathing syntheses.

The Brutalisme Lyrique rejects the classicized forms of ethical realism, aiming to redefine the perception, not the artistic standard. It also opposes the illusions generated by the pseudo-geometric coincidences born out of pictorial attempts emptied of rational intent. Conversely, it seeks for a form of emotional monumentality parameterized by metallic-accented acrylic details in order to achieve both continuity and aesthetic unity.

Polysemantically constructed, the exhibition aims to modify the perception of the exhibition visitors, to transform them from simple viewers of the very instant into contemplators of time, sweeping between the recent works of Alexandru Crișan and the stages preceding the creation. With a particular key of understanding and reading, the exhibition explores sensitive lines of interpretation from the last decades, the connections and influences, cycling around the visual creative dialogues from the world, life and works of Constantin Brâncuși. The subtleties of the connections reside in the memory persistence of the places origin of origin, in the persistence of sound, of vibration, in the persistence of heritage sensations and coherent interpretations in a world of sedative noise.

The exhibition starts from the contemplative process that precedes the act of creation. It builds a bridge of artistic origins, bringing together the unchanged frames of a world seemingly frozen in time, in the recent image archive that immortalizes eternal fragments of vernacular heritage (in the Filmic Projection AI = VR * t² / Architectural Intelligence = Vernacular Resilience x time).

In a bona fide artistic SAFARI, through image, narrative, and documentary archive, ROOTS is an elaborate meditation on the act of pre-creative contemplation, highlighting the vernacular immovable heritage as a vital source of artistic inspiration, a starting point for modern and contemporary creation.

Most things in life start with either Aristotle or a cup of coffee; they begin with the seminal philosopher, if one is patient; they kick off with the joltingly meditative brew, if one has hasty daybreaks, as I do – let’s call them the small hours of Prime (we should be listening to John Dowland’s Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares during such hours). I’ve arrived to this conclusion since one of my foundational books is De Poetica, hence my belief in absolutes and, consequently, in artistic imitations. In Section I, Part II of Poetics, Aristotle writes that: “[…] we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life.” Since my adolescence, I’ve asked myself if I’m true to the moral essence of my artistic subjects; gradually, I’ve arrived at a synthesis of Brutalism and Abstract Expressionism which seems to answer that question by substituting form (which is to say embodiment) with chromatic essence.

Speaking of essence & Aristotle, in “Il nome della rosa” (1980), Umberto Eco uses the lost second book of Poetics, the one “dissecting” laughter, as a plot trump card. Allegedly, it is a book worth dying for. Allegedly, it is a book worth killing for. We should have an espresso (let’s mark the hour as the time of the Vesper, but listen to the “Running to the Edge of the World” by Marilyn Manson) and forget about the murders, though. Instead, we should focus on the library that secretly preserves “vegetal memory”, to use a 2005 Eco metaphor, or, in the case of parchments, beastly memory. In this library, the books are geographically organized; the Finis Africae room, named after the postulated edge of the world, indicates that it is adjacent to the Leones rooms, where books by African authors are kept. Simply put, the subject of my work is the mirror that conceals the Finis Africae door. So, please, let me know: what do you see in this work?

Postface

Speaking of Africa, HIC SVNT LEONES. Let’s say we are now at the Compline time, and there’s chatter that African art is what made Brâncuși… well, Brâncuși! Let’s say we read some analyses by Sidney Geist, Robert Goldwater, Jean Laude or Jacob Epstein (have another espresso, please, and some google me-time; feel free to use some semantron – toacă – call to prayer, if it helps). Let’s say that we see similarities – if not iteration – between The First Step and Dogon figures, between Little French Girl and Senufo “déguélé” helmet masks, between the Caryatid (and The Kiss) and Baluba sculptures. Let’s say that we can also observe some similarities between my Leitmotif and some portrait(s). Let’s say you’ve seen almost identical portraits every single day of your life, right before you’ve bolted for the door – for your own door. Let’s say “So what”, as we listen to Miles Davis together. Let’s read together Mircea Eliade’s conclusion: “Brâncuși was eminently a contemporary of this tendency toward “interiorization” and exploration of the “depths,” a contemporary of this passionate interest in the primitive, prehistoric, and prerational stage of human creativity. Having grasped the central “secret”—that it is not the creations of ethnic or folk art in themselves that will enable us to renew and enrich modern art but rather the discovery of their “sources”— Brâncuși threw himself into an endless quest that was terminated only by his death.” We should have no more coffee, for it is already Matins time. * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C.)

Do you remember what happened when Constantin Brâncuși went toe to toe with the US Customs? Well, it did happened, like, a 100 years ago, so… But you’ve read about it, just like you’ve read that, back then, women were wearing cloche hats, tomboyish bobs, flappers and Chanel’s 1926 little black dresses, while men were wearing tweeds and flannels, and their hair styled slick with greasy products (if we’re ignoring Trotsky and Mussolini, of course! But who could, in fact, ignore them? It’ not like they were Romanian peasants, or anything…). You may have also learned that a New York judge, when presented with a case which questioned the artistic value/authenticity of Brâncuși’s Bird in Space, conservatively (or populistically, take your pick!) asked: “If you saw it in the forest, would you take a shot at it?”, while most likely trying to match the sculptor’s visionary (some would say futuristic) synthesis with the quaint, but tasty, vision of a pheasant…
Well, the story does have a happy ending: the Customs Court ruled, two years later, in 1928, that Brâncuși’s creation was, indeed, a work of art, and not a “manufacture of metal”, thus it was to be allowed duty-free into the USA. Moreover, while the bronze sculpture was bureaucratically labeled as some sort of a “kitchen accessory” at the time, and would have fetched a $4,000 duty to the US budget, a marble and bronze version of the work would set an auction record in 2005, when it was sold for the astonishing price of $27.5m. Money & anecdotes changed hands, every ear pricked up, form was set aloose upon the world… Now, this painting of mine is about a woman I absolutely love. * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C.)

In my mind – therefore in my hands – when Brâncuși was shaping The First Cry (1917), he was absorbed by heartbeats, as Beethoven’s 9th was playing in the background, mystifying the background, possibly backwards, possibly on a skipping disc, possibly only the first three minutes of it. Beginnings are rarely self-explanatory; they crave context, they crave hindsight, which is to say they crave form. In my mind – therefore in my hands – there was a fear of darkness which was lending expediency to Brâncuși’s fingers. Around 1908, that fear was already emerging from the conformist, rather romanticized rendition of nutritional rest, in which one can almost see a rapid cellular division towards an unsettling puberty: the Head of a Sleeping Child has always disquieted me a little bit, with its Classical mechanistic attempt at divination, with its regrets played in reverse. I remember reading somewhere that during that period, after setting up his studio @ (sic! – I often think of Paris as the artist’s host server!) 54 rue du Montparnasse, Brâncuși felt increasingly disappointed with his previous work, referring to it as “beef-stake”, as plagued by fleshly mimicry.

By 1924, however, I think that fear had been completely exorcised, hence The Beginning of the World; there is a resolute vibration emerging from the ovoid, affording an Apollonian quality to that work; I, for one, recognize in that vibration a solar virtue that makes me (dramatically) envious: Brâncuși had geometricized an ascending order of photons, taming and, if the light is true, muffling out whichever cut of darkness one discovers in one’s self as age, well, happens.

Now, please take another look at my Overture, while standing approximately 10 feet (3 meters) away from it! From my mind – therefore from my hands – I hope the architecture of a promise is surfacing. * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C.)

I

Portraiture is a (desperation)
game. In any portrait, the (chromatic)
nutrients are being sapped (more or less involuntarily)
from both the model and the artist (from both the suffragette and the ally),
both strutting the catwalk (the commercial scaffolding),
by the banal fact that any (untainted)
natural process has a (dubious, but unescapable)
destination, and that back-tracking is a (labyrinthine)
illusion. Deciding on the size of your canvases becomes (counterintuitively)
trivial, considering that the inevitable transfer (and transformation)
of energy will only lead to more and more (& more & more) (of its)
waste. These are the reasons why I’ve started this canvas (and, in fact, the entire “Entropy” series)
with a desire for a revealing uniformity (with an en Brunaille intent).
But the deluge of potential nuances overwhelmed the coherence of my work, so stratification (and sublimation)
became paramount. As an architect, I feel at ease tinkering with (Sgraffito)
“frequency responses”, and I wanted to propagate them into the acrylic.

II

Only a Brutalist resolve has stopped me from overwhelming you, the viewer, with ornamental clues that would have artificially increased the musicality of this work. But I wanted this painting to reverberate like Arvo Part’s Kanon Pokajanen, not like Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. I wanted it to feel to the eye just like Brâncuși’s Măiastra does. According to the exigent and passionate Ionel Jianou, Brâncuși himself has explained, in various contexts: “I wanted the Măiastra to raise its head aloft without expressing either pride or defiance by that movement. That was the most difficult problem, and it was only after a long struggle that I succeeded in integrating that movement into the soaring movement of the bird’s flight.”

III

As for this painting, while my chromatic impulsiveness has been nurtured by Caravaggio (Polidoro da, to be precise), it came to terms with itself once (K) Malevich has lowered my heartbeat. And trapped inside this trek, there is a (achromatic and ominous) susurration. One can hear it in Rome, outside the Palazzo Massimo Istoriato, just as loudly as one can hear it while crashing White on White. I hear it in this work, too. I think it holds an aviary panache that describes one’s journey (one’s orderly aging migration) which, in turn, puts a swooshing spin on one’s solipsism (on one’s safest space). In short, what you’re hearing, even between acrylic gradations, is more important that who you’re confessing (even/mostly to yourself) you are; let’s make a slogan (a crooked slogan) out of this: otology trumps ontology (since every single echo will outlast you, just as its source has preceded you).

Nevertheless (once you’ve opened your eyes again), you should be willing to accept that, in this illustration (in this cathartic chronicle of an act of “Brutalisme lyrique” intent), in the description that you’re reading right now, the above parentheses have trapped the only truths that matter, the ones that are as non-fungible as the stained-glass shards that you can observe flying towards the edge of the canvas. Hence the craving Brâncuși himself expressed with such joyous desperation: “I have been searching a whole lifetime for only one thing: the essence of flight . . . . Flight, what happiness!” * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C.)

Please, feel free to take a photo! Right now, as you’re standing in front of this Forex panel, reading these words, glimpsing at the painting above it, please, feel free to take your phone out for a selfie with this here “thru a self, narrowly”! Now, what kind of a photo did you just snap? Is it a portrait? An event photo? Did you photograph a work of art, or did you just add one more proof of life to that ever-expanding gallery that rocks your phone almost alive?

I’d say that the (hopefully askew) composition that you’ve just orchestrated gives the photography that you’re about to share with your friends a peculiar quality: it affords the painting a new state of equilibrium – the equilibrium that I was afraid to ask for when I’ve painted it.

The late Robert Smithson created in 1968 a series of works entitled Nonsites. They consisted of several progressively proportioned wooden bin-like structures filled with the rocks the artist had picked up from different New Jersey locations. Those locations were the actual sites. The artist’s works were the “nonsites”. In Smithson’s own words: “By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a “logical two dimensional picture.” A “logical picture” differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor—A is Z. The Nonsite (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this three dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—thus The Nonsite.”

Now, when I’ve started working on this third soi-disant Entropy painting, the image I had to get out of my head was that of two golden, thick-skinned panels, embossed in a Lyrical Brutalist style, caught in a dynamic equilibrium with a viewer such as yourself. To me, that is still the “actual site”, as real a rock or an opera house. Together, I think we just might have created a “nonsite”. The question I want to ask you is: should we also do something about Brâncuși’s Table of Silence? * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C.)

The thing is, all such ontological vivisections are exclusively performed on personal pronouns, on our inner simplicity. They require scalpels: Talmudic, Aristotelian, Spinozist, Freudian, Biblical… In my case, the only anaesthetic allowed is terebenthene. And Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes (no 1, no 3 and no 4, even though as I’m getting older, Sepultura’s Roots has its own Xeroxed way of helping me time-travel!). Surgical textbooks are so heavily codified (and priced!) that one needs to settle for mere blueprints: from the finger-marks cathartically integrated into the mondmilch of the Pech-Merle cave ceilings, to Brâncuși’s Fish (1930), and, finally, to the Outrenoir metonymically masticated by Pierre Soulages. And, at the end of the day(s), after you have opened your “residual self” like a book (one that’s been heavily edited by your genitors – the very one you’re planning to use as a hand-me-down peace offering to your offspring), the only Dantesque hope you can muster is that some sort of post-mortem polychromatic transubstantiation will ensue. Of course, such maladaptive narcissism, which borderlines idolatry, is at the very core of the impulse to misinterpret the Socratic dictum “The unexamined life is not worth living”. However, just as most Brutalist monumentalities seem to require only banal gravitational pull to irk the drizzle of time, and just as all the Abstraction Lyrique selfies seem to rely solipsistically only on the centrifugal decomposition of randomly-clustered photons, the fact remains that the amour-de-soi needs nothing but a heartbeat to make you forget everything you’ve hoped your own simplicity would sooth. Alas, sophistication and consequential sophistry are pure BS when it comes the unidirectional flow of survival (and, consequently, of grief), hence the title of this work. * (appendix / from a dialogue on works between C.S.D. and A.C.)

I’m an idiosyncratic artist with a penchant for dynamic coalescences. I’ve started pondering about the “asymmetry of time” after a deeply personal loss in 2017. The exorcizing premeditation of my work was being tainted somehow by technical conundrums: I was preoccupied by an alla prima acrylic synthesis, by Caravaggio’s “impasto a corpo”, and by Jean-Paul Riopelle’s palette-knife(d) syncopated cacophonies. Finding my way out of such (seductively engineering) circumstantiality-echoes called for a methodological U-turn. The exit strategy became a roadmap once such adapted “acrylic syllables” found their groupishess within egotistic – yet melioristic – “rhymes” (and not default words/pigments) and then into beton-brut “verses” (i.e., not lukewarm sentences/textures). To put it differently, I now act as a painter (abstract, perhaps) and I final-cut as an architect (deconstructivist, probably). Let me unpack this approach by pointing out several key-elements of my work, rooted in architectural tenets: I’m interested in sculptural theses, not in reactionary chroma-stasis; in gravitational mergers, not in inertial continuities; in the tactile, not in the penumbra; in the self-sustainable monumentality, not in the anthropomorphic ephemera; in metabolism, not in siestas; in anagrams, not in metaphors; in the tectonic, not in the mimetic; in the macroscopic synthesis, not in the sartorial minutiae. I’ve called the consequential symbiosis “Brutalisme lyrique”. It “simply” indicates a filiation in which the Abstraction Lyrique is a phenomenological motherly figure, while the nybrutalism may claim ontological paternal custody, yet the – ultimately needed – IVF-like metabolic praxeology is delivering the visceral coherence. To double-down on the architectural faux jargon, this genealogy includes several distant cousins: stereotomy, Sgraffito techniques and came glassworks – they are slices of the crafts that configure my creative process. This “pedigree” sprouts mechanics of integrated/geometricized POVs, isometric rustications in acrylic camouflage, and cyclopean alliterations – all weaved into amoral dreamcatchers and a Newtonian fluxions mise-en-scène. I am using such terminology to indicate that I’m hunting for perceptions, not normative standards. In fact, I completely reject the ethical realism instilled into the core of the New Brutalism (à la Peter and Alison Smithson, the Hunstanton Robin Hood Gardens architects). I aim not to preach towards political/ urbanistic praxes, but to discover (in Platonist sense) perfectible, immersive geometric idioms, to bottleneck chroma-spatiality, and to use seemingly impacted dermis as a defensive layer against the entropic “arrow of time”. Additionally, I’m rejecting dogmatic illusions (à la Georges Mathieu) of coincidental pseudo-geometrical outputs and non-cognitive kinetic blueprints. I do not want to surrender to some extirpative psychosomatic fits which need perpetual contextualization. What I do what is to domesticate any affectual monumentality I can parameterize within acrylic details, and to use the cracks of paint and the dents of the 91.7% pure gold leaves (or silver, or copper – just not variegated leaves!) to multiply the hinges and the joints of one’s own identity – while testing the boundaries of Physiology and Physics with uchronian intent. Finally (i.e., eschatologically speaking – pun intended!), I hunt for a psyche-transliterating, borderline somatic expressivity, rooted, nevertheless, in a utilitarian purifying télos – the crudity of which marches in lockstep with its purposefully irregular reflections. I believe the selected works from my “Entropy” series that I’m submitting for your review are reflecting touchstones of my detailed approach.

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