The air was stuffy (sun),
yet those who no longer needed to breathe regarded serenely
the torrid heat drying but the pots à feu,
not the moss and the lichens.
Today-and-yesterday inscriptions were trebling.
The alleys were sweeping among the untrodden ironmongery,
the heated resins, black leafage, lack of shade.
A sunset among this conglomerate of small houses, hence lacking windows,
wherefrom nobody goes out, on thresholds and benches.
Excess of flowers, scattered boxes with flames.
It՚s here that Bogdan Vlăduță wants to make a filmed conversation with me,
here, in the place of the cimisis transfiguration, a graveyard
among ruins. They come here maybe once a year, maybe once in seven years,
a dissection hall and an undoing, or doing, exhibition hall, when they bring crates
and spread idly the wrapping sheets,
and hang strings, hooks or labels on the walls.
Scripts are trebling in the undulated air,
generations cohabitate – those who write in the Cyrillic alphabet, with accents,
with Latin characters, with diacritics,
in Oriental or German garments,
have all of them loved flowers and the exotic vegetation?
I sat for Bogdan: he was Van Gogh, my brother, I was there too.
In front of us: coffins, boxes for long tail flowers.
We looked at them as to the pine box badge,
we talked about how to pose, how to break the verticals,
or if it՚s worth some composition;
about the others who՚d like to join us – Mitroi, Bernea and how many.
Bogdan was working quietly, unmissed, like a barman surveying his customers.
A recent eternity? These people don’t know what time is,
just decrepitude, a transformation the eyes can՚t see.
Their controversies indulge one another.
We made painting, we singled out the smells.
Nowadays, to make painting means to regard augurs fly away
or simply develop from nest to pray and back – clouds blurred by other clouds.
Painting has suffered some levelling due to non-transient techniques.
World can՚t be stopped, it՚s like a voluntary and involuntary internet,
of things remembered and remembering, a to-and-fro
that doesn’t embarrass the soliloquy, the meditation.
Bogdan had talent, gift, unknown facilities of a swift development,
yet had the meekness to accept the strong purposes
imagining that a genius has to be subdued to a peculiar direction.
Fiery tempers have blocked, have diverted the stream to their ponds.
We can recognize them in the empty coffins: stripes of painting shades,
voids, dry zeroes, tin plates wherefrom the alms nourished these forerunners.
When he succeeded to join our meeting,
to question with no answer, he discovered what a coming intrusive ghost was,
volitions still claming the partly effaced (wiped out) principles.
Van Gogh seemed a solitary, but proves to be a companion,
a ferryman – Charon? He waited us on roasted potatoes,
took out one of his eyes in order to save his soul.
He insists no longer on the theory of colours,
stays no more with his brother only.
Death has unravelled to all (of them) the submission and speech.
He makes a painting with no sun in the sky, or even without a sky.
One could say it՚s night, one could also say it՚s apocalyptic, but the apocalypse loses the sun
and, in the same time, catches the light of the second coming.
A rather dead, exhausted sky, a sky that abandons hope,
the sin, an antonym of temptation.
It՚s the interrogation of value, there՚s no answer, the value is incognizable,
the tokens the men give are contradictory.
Then, a signal from the above comes: iconicity,
the divine we haven’t noticed, the stumbling block.
Let՚s have a trick in this spirit, let՚s not question the value any longer –
will it re-place the sun on Bogdan Vlăduță՚s images?
What՚s worth wishing? To turn the stones into bread?
No, just to come to feeding ourselves “by every word of God”1,
as images (icons) are words՚ relatives. This is our concern!
Ought we cast ourselves down from the heights so as to crumble on stones
՚cause of starvation or of despair?
Ought we have all the kingdoms of the world2, ought the world look for us,
ought the world speak about us first of all?
“We ought not to put the yoke upon the others՚ neck, which neither we were able to bear.”3
“We ought not to think that the Godhead is like onto gold, or silver,
or stone, graven by art and man՚s device.”4
The 20th century lost the portrait in the sense of a dialogue accessible to the public –
the traditional portrait, concluded with the 19th-century miniaturists and photographers.
The new, revolutionary century is destructive, yet pretending it՚s constructive,
it brings forward dictators, well-groomed masks, fakes, touch-ups, anti-portraits.
Even from its early years. And the artists change direction toward the unseen:
Paul Klee, Brancusi, Picasso display the shape in front of the beholder.
Some photographers (Avedon, Man Ray) are also prepared to tear apart.
Only Romania is still bringing about surprises.
With his quasi-hunting perception, Horia Bernea accounts for this classic-genre degradation
and re-attempts the portrait via self-portrait, without achieving more than something
too general, too optically wasted, like with Giacometti and Gorduz. He՚s inefficient.
We can’t learn too much about man through a portrait – just how the shape enters a rectangle.
Where is the Bernea I have once met? The superior and strong man,
the details, his unique pear-tree –
found out in The Pear-tree, the arbor, and in the Gardens he used to paint.
We needed a man with a visual memory that is used to learn, to preserve,
in photography or painting, characters, spiritual details, and pass them on.
The man, the public one, stands neither his image –
he՚d crash it –, nor the other՚s – he՚d tear and smear
the posters, the advertisements, where somebody՚s figure appears.
Yet what the artists do: what a state have they mistreated this icon!
We could accept things the way they are, in the way Geta Brătescu draws and writes:
– Charlot, the 20th-century saint – though Charlot is a mask;
– The Tramp is but a role – he՚s nobody.
We could ponder on whether there are distinct human traces
under the portrait masks made by Francis Bacon.
Bogdan Vlăduță knew Bernea, they were friends,
maybe under his influence he started to quest the self-portrait.
From head to toe, nude. Maybe concomitantly with the photo self-portrait in the corridors of the Institute of Fine Arts, where he used to work as a lecturer.
Look around, a search in the void, it՚s not Le temps perdu, but a lost present.
Not because others would be dressed, but Neue Wilde,
not representations, but the refuse to stand for a man.
The nude? People՚s mutual fear, the fear that we could see one another.
Let՚s compare Guernica with Show Your Wound! by Beuys. Maybe it՚s also about the language age, the 1937 oeuvre made in Paris – a heat of the moment, open-mouth heads thrown back, a horse drumming in the room, a bull staring blankly –, today, after 2000, at Reina Sophia. Protest? Symbols? They say that, during occupation, a German (still in Paris) asks Picasso: “It՚s you who made that?” The author answers: “No, it՚s you!” In fact, what is there? A hustle and bustle of shapes, sprawled fingers and toes? Who can’t recognize what is painted?
Beuys has a room for displaying wounds. He says: “Society is sick!” Two dissection tables, a test tube with a bird skull, farm tools, some kind of scarecrows, boxes with fat, a thermometer… At least the title remains. He says: “You display your wounds in order to heal them!”
In their time (during the war), shape disintegration played a topical role, though Picasso approached it even before the First World War. At another time, the spotlight could bemuse: while a woman, from its centaur-like bottom, figures the sex of the animal with her hand, as a lamp seen from below – that is, a play with the sources of light.
Show Your Wound! becomes a similitude between the drawn oeuvre and the wound, and vice versa. Can be the scar a sign of recovery?
Zeige, the eclectic, can be the mania to show the wounds,
beggary,
the news, the present-day, breaking,
towards Germany, so she could heal from the “wounds”, or bear them even if recovered?
Bogdan Vlăduță looks like, even is, Thomas the Apostle on the Sunday after Easter.
Which nobody dares.
Impatience, staggering, will he touch or won՚t he touch,
will he still remember, will that remain qua stigma or will he forget?
Even by touching, in the next moment,
when the hand pulls back, nothing has been.
Jesus untroubled, like he who has the wound.
Performance is a sub-branch of the self-portrait.
The felt hat, Beuys՚ face resembling Van Gogh՚s, yet less hollowed.
Vlăduță՚s performance at the faculty: for the revival of the nude genre,
or for the performance genre, there where the chairs are dealing with the classic genres of art?
For democracy? The model species, a disdained cast.
Studies after nature, after model or after the professor?
Is there in Egypt an art for the living, or only for the dead?
The image of death is, however, the image of another life. Death means life.
Is death seen in the mirror?
It should. “When I paint, I know I՚ll die!” says Vlăduță.
Vlăduță՚s option is for Rome – neither for Jerusalem, nor for the Nile Valley –,
for ancient Rome, to which Peter and Paul go, for a Rome which loses her own faith
and takes desperate, dictatorial, actions against Christians.
Van Gogh՚s bed like a formidable Roman sarcophagus.
Painting alternates with installation.
The self-portrait is installed via equivalences,
balm, canvases, plaster, wood, sheet-metal.
A self-portrait with a plate lighting his face bent down over it.
An empty plate. “Not by bread alone, but by every word of God.”5
Spring 2019
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1. The Gospel acc. to St. Luke 4, 4.
2. Idem 4, 5–9.
3. The Acts of the Apostles 15, 10.
4. Idem 17, 29.
5. The Gospel acc. to St. Luke 4, 4.
